HC was featured in the Danish magazine Homotropolis. You can view the full issue here.

My brother lives in Sweden. By Sarah Palin standards, Denmark is in his living room.

I think this article is proof that the new way forward for HC is for me and Kelly to write blog posts, have them professionally translated into Danish, and then Google Translate them back into English.

I’m not sure how I feel that the Google Translation of what we’re saying is funnier than anything we’ve originally said in English when we were trying to be funny on purpose, but who am I to deny advances in technology?  Thus, I present to you the Google translation of the article:

A feeling of being the only gay in the world with an interest in climbing gave Alex Rowland idea for ‘HomoClimbtastic’ – a spacious association that aims to lead climb lustful LGBTQ’er together. The club is today both incredibly popular and respected, and the reason lies in the culture that we have managed to create.

“Although we are most LGBTQ’er, so the door is open to all. It turns out that many heterosexuals are at least as interested in stepping out of the hetero-sexist culture we are. And it’s not so much that they want to be with us because we are queer, but more about that we all have in common that we appreciate diversity, “says founder Alex Rowland.

Talking more about dick than other climbing clubs Kelly Gray, a climber from Austin, Texas who has been with the ‘HomoClimbtastic’ for several years, says that one of the benefits of being part of a LGBTQ club just the freedom to be themselves .

“We talk a lot more about dick here than they do in the other clubs. Both cock, wax treatments, the lesbian scissors, gay movies and drag queens come regularly to the court and it would never talk about in a ‘regular’ climbing club ‘.

“To climb with an LGBTQ group means that I can be myself all the way through. I do not hide my sexuality or worry about whether I get thrown somewhere back in the face because I talk about my husband, “said Kelly Gray.

Both the heart and brain are

Regardless common denominators as sexual orientation, gender identity and queerness, it’s rock climbing that binds members ‘HomoClimbtastic’ together.
The hearts banks of the great moments in the company of nature’s self-created challenges. It’s all about unique experiences seen from angles that only those people ever, and so challenging at the same time the brain.

“It requires full brain activity and a really intense focus when you have to figure out how best to forcing a cliff,” says Alex Rowland, whose
most unforgettable experience with climbing is at least as much about romance.

“My guy and I was in New Zealand, where we hired a boat to take us out of this one small, secluded bay with instructions to pick us up again exactly the same place 48 hours later. We steamed mussels, was naked and read books, climbed part and had more sex in two days than I thought was humanly possible. It was really amazing times, “recalls Alex, who normally works as a lawyer and lives in a small town in the state of Georgia.

For Kelly Gray is rock climbing also to see the world from new angles:

“I love to dwell outdoors, I love the equipment, and I love how a climber will be able to see amazing places from a completely different perspective. Yosemite National Park in California look, for example, much more spectacular from a high rock face than it does from hiking trails. As a climber you get the opportunity to see the world in a different way. ”

And the Danish original:
En følelse af at være den eneste homo i verden med interesse for klatring gav Alex Rowland idéen til ‘HomoClimbtastic’ – en rummelig forening der har til formål at føre klatrelystne LGBTQ’er sammen. Klubben er i dag både utrolig populær og respekteret, og årsagen skal findes i den kultur, som det er lykkedes at skabe.

»Selv om vi er flest LGBTQ’er, så står døren åben for alle. Det viser sig nemlig, at rigtig mange heteroseksuelle er mindst lige så interesserede i at træde ud af den heterosexistiske kultur, som vi selv er. Og det handler ikke så meget om, at de ønsker at være sammen med os, fordi vi er queer, men mere om at vi allesammen har det til fælles, at vi værdsætter forskelligheder«, siger stifteren Alex Rowland.

Taler mere om pik end andre klatreklubber Kelly Gray, en klatrer fra Austin i Texas som har været med i ‘HomoClimbtastic’ i adskillige år, fortæller at en af fordelene ved at være med i en LGBTQ-klub netop er friheden til at være sig selv.

»Vi taler en hel del mere om pik her, end man gør i de andre klubber. Både pik, voksbehandlinger, den lesbiske saks, homofilm og dragdronninger kommer jævnligt på banen, og det ville man jo aldrig snakke om i en ‘almindelig’ klatreklub«.

»At klatre sammen med en LGBTQ-gruppe betyder, at jeg kan være mig selv hele vejen igennem. Jeg behøver ikke lægge skjul på min seksualitet eller bekymre mig om, hvorvidt jeg får smidt et eller andet tilbage i ansigtet, fordi jeg taler om min mand«, siger Kelly Gray.

Både hjertet og hjernen er med

Uanset fællesnævnere som seksuel orientering, kønsidentitet og queerness, så er det klippeklatring der binder medlemmerne i ‘HomoClimbtastic’ sammen.
Hjerterne banker for de storslåede øjeblikke i selskab med naturens selvskabte udfordringer. Det handler om unikke oplevelser set fra vinkler der kun er de færreste forundt, og så udfordrer det samtidig hjernen.

»Det kræver fuld hjerneaktivitet og et virkelig intenst fokus, når man skal regne ud, hvordan man bedst muligt forcerer en klippe«, fortæller Alex Rowland, hvis
mest uforglemmelige oplevelse med klatring handler mindst lige så meget om romantik.

»Min fyr og jeg var på New Zealand, hvor vi hyrede en båd til at sejle os ud til denne her lille, afsidesliggende  bugt med instruktioner om at hente os igen nøjagtig samme sted 48 timer senere. Vi dampede muslinger, lå nøgne og læste bøger, klatrede en del og havde mere sex på to døgn end jeg troede var menneskeligt muligt. Det var virkelig fantastiske tider«, mindes Alex, der til daglig arbejder som advokat og bor i en mindre by i staten Georgia.

For Kelly Gray handler klippeklatring også om at se verden fra nye vinkler:

»Jeg elsker at opholde mig udendørs, jeg elsker udstyret, og jeg elsker hvordan man som klatrer får mulighed for at se fantastiske steder fra et helt andet perspektiv. Yosemite National Park i Californien ser for eksempel meget mere spektakulær ud fra en høj klippeside, end den gør fra vandrestierne. Som klatrer får man mulighed for at se verden på en anden måde«.

I was prompted to write this blog (updated for factual accuracy) after several friends asked me recently who Craig Pack is.  My answer is about five years late (for which I apologize to Craig), but perhaps it will shed some more light on the history of homo climbing and the importance of mentoring in the gay climbing community.  Thanks for reading!  — Todd

—

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to create and sustain an intergenerational community of queer climbers who learn from one another, share experiences, and become responsible for passing knowledge down to others.  For me (as with Erik Carlson and many other climbers in the San Francisco bay area), our climbing “careers” started with Craig Pack.

I started climbing sometime in 1998, and it was shortly thereafter (probably early 2000) that I first met Craig at the Mission Cliffs climbing gym in San Francisco.  Craig grew up in Fresno, California, a short drive from the Yosemite valley, where he learned to climb as a kid from the masters.  But it wasn’t the most welcoming place for gay people, and he experienced tremendous bigotry, some within the climbing community itself. When I met Craig, he was splitting his time between San Francisco and Truckee, near Donner Summit in Lake Tahoe.

Craig had been climbing for decades and had scaled miles upon miles of vertical terrain.  For Craig, climbing was as natural as walking, and anyone who climbed with Craig was always amazed that he seemed to walk up unprotected, slabby, vertical faces (in Joshua Tree, in Yosemite, in Tahoe, in Tuolumne), as if he was on level ground.  He was never flustered when climbing; his legs never shook; he just stepped with elegance, regardless of whether or not there was protection.  I would call it the grace of a dancer who just intuits where to step and how to move.

As I would later find out, Craig was not only one of the founding leaders of Stonewall Climbers (purportedly “Earth’s first lesbian, gay, and bisexual climbing club”), but he also won the gold at the Gay Games in Amsterdam in 1998.  He had established climbs in the Needles and the Sierras, with several first ascents and many seconds under his belt.  Shortly after we met, he taught me how to lead climb and helped me get (quite modestly!) “lead certified” at the gym.  I wasn’t the only one that he mentored.  There was easily a half-dozen or more gay climbers that Craig was patiently training, not to mention a network of LGBT climbers across north America with whom he climbed.  In the early 2000s, we began making multi-day climbing trips all over California and Nevada, mostly climbing trad (and mostly me following).  He was a generous and extraordinarily patient leader.  He taught me how to build and equalize anchors, how to place and remove gear, how to climb multi-pitch, and how to read routes and understand sequences.  He also trusted me to catch his falls (which rarely happened).  Although perhaps one of the easier routes we did together, the Regular Route on Fairview Dome in Tuolumne Meadows is one of my most memorable: At nearly 1,000 feet, the climb starts with a 5.9 crack, before culminating in a stemming sequence leading to a four-foot roof, and topping out on large flakes and ledgy features.  It’s widely considered one of the 50 best climbs in North America.  As I got stronger, we started doing more sport climbing, pushing and inspiring each other.  We climbed in Joshua Tree, Donner Summit, Lover’s Leap, Big Chief, Red Rocks, Bishop, the high Sierras, and many other places.  He not only taught me how to climb, but he also taught me (perhaps without consciously knowing it) how to teach others to climb.  In essence, he taught me to share the love, experience, and knowledge of climbing with others.

Five years ago this October, Craig was climbing alone in Donner Summit when he slipped, falling to the ground.  He was found hours later (thankfully his cell phone worked), with two shattered ankles, head trauma, and massive disc compression in his back.  He had to wear a mobility-limiting “turtle cast” for months and later, when the cast came off, he hauled his decimated body up and down the stairs in his house by his hands.  Full of pins and metal plates, both ankles became infected and required numerous surgeries.  The road to recovery has been unimaginably long and arduous.

Many people shake their heads when I bring up the issue of soloing, muttering things like ‘how can you be so crazy/stupid?’ or ‘I would never free solo’ (as if roped climbing will keep you 100% safe).  Craig had bouldered alone and soloed countless times before.  He was on his home terrain, climbing well within his ability, although the weather conditions were hardly ideal.  He wasn’t, comparatively speaking, that far off the ground (I remember how, to my astonishment, he free soloed the first 70 foot pitch of Prince of Darkness in Red Rocks, belayed me up, then lowered to get his jacket, and soloed it again).  I truly believe that soloing is right—and even sane and meaningful—for some people.  Craig climbed with such grace that “protection” was, perhaps, intended for others, like me, who over-thought climbing, who hesitated, whose feet fumbled and whose hands clenched the rock too tightly.  Every once in a while, when I stop thinking and simply climb, I embody—if only for a moment—that grace and elegance of movement that defined Craig’s style.

Since his accident, I find myself wanting to share climbing with other gay climbers by helping to create a community of people, who will, in turn, mentor other young climbers. In its best sense, mentoring is not one-directional, but rather a recursive relationship, in which the seasoned climber both shares his or her wealth of experience with others and is open to learning new things from (and approaching new challenges with) lesser experienced climbers.  After Craig’s accident, I felt a strange emptiness, but I also realized that my own role in the climbing community was changing – and that, perhaps, like Craig, I could give something back by sharing the knowledge, enthusiasm, and experiences that he shared with me.

In climbing, we are all somewhere along the shifting continuum of mentors and mentees.  Every mentor has something to learn from others and has something to teach.  And every mentee has something to teach and also has something to learn.  Sometimes our primary roles reverse themselves, unexpectedly, as mine did after Craig’s accident.  These interactions and relationships of teaching one another through respect and caring are what constitute a climbing community.  It’s something that I find to be the most compelling part of participating in Homo Climbtastic.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t add, as I’m sure Craig would appreciate, the unending stream of eye-candy is a nice touch, too.

Women don’t need climbing ropes, what their their power to SHUT THAT WHOLE THING DOWN

Rape?  On the HomoClimbtastic blog?  Well, there’s enough dispute at the conventions over rape jokes (as there is everywhere else, I’m sure) to make it relevant, but even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t give a shit.  It certainly won’t stop me from writing open letters to Rick Santorum; I don’t care if he releases a 20 page memo with a ten page disclaimer explaining how his views have absolutely nothing to do with fags on rocks.

But if you still feel raw about it, you can just not read the blog, or write your own content for it, either one is ok.  Our standards are low.

On with the column.

* * *

The first boy I ever kissed was a prostitute.

We’ll get back to that.

My last post about feminism had, in a way, remarkable timing—after condemning (albeit sarcastically) women for not throwing down the feminist gauntlet, the recent Facebook-plosion about Representative Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape” not leading to pregnancy caused exactly the Facebook backlash from women that I was eulogizing.  Women, it turns out, will put up with a lot, but you damn well better not fuck with them when it concerns legitimizing rape.

I am excited about this revolt.  Several writers commented that finally we might have something that would be a catalyst for getting women to rally around that whole feminist thing that got set over in the corner somewhere a hundred years ago.  But if that something is going to be rape, (which is fine, because a catalyst can be anything,) we should probably talk about that whole rape thing.

So, with that in mind, I wanted to continue my thoughts from my last blog—the response to Akin hasn’t fully materialized yet.  It’s still shaping up.  I’m hoping I can steer it in a particular direction, which is that rape isn’t about women.

I’ll get back to that.

First, a sidenote/parallel about racism:

Racism has been and continues to be a vehicle of convenience for The Oppressors.   The Civil War offers a great example of this.  The major beneficiaries, the slave owners, didn’t even fight in the damn war.  They sent all the less well-to-do white people off to do it, and the male southern population was decimated (as was much of the north) to protect the financial interests of people they didn’t much care for (typical for a war, I’m aware, but that’s not what I’m getting at).  Poor white people continued to vote for and oppress black people for… well… indefinitely, but that was just the collateral damage to the original goal—economic dominance for a small number of people.  Our slave state, in its beginnings, actually had plenty of enslaved white people, but they kept escaping, what with their tendency to blend in to their surroundings, and thus the slave owners were forced to import more people who looked different and couldn’t as easily duck into a European-colonized settlement.  And thus the holocaust of African-American slavery was born, and racism against darker skinned people in the centuries since: collateral damage.  I bet when I say to picture in your mind, SLAVES!, you don’t imagine white people, do ya?

So now, we have poor white people, who will literally vote against their own welfare benefits.  They’re convinced that they’re getting taxed and undeserving black people are getting the money.  I’ve met these people.  They own a lot of cats.

But that’s kind of the point of racism, and all power brokering, whether on a nationwide scale, in office politics, or in a jail—give some poor bastards slightly more power (or the illusion of) and prestige than the other poor bastards, and nobody will go after the warden.

We all know this, right?

When I hear people talk about rape, it’s very frequently discussed as though it’s some kind of man vs. woman problem, as though rape were the ultimate reification of men’s subjugation of women.  But to put it in those terms is to ignore two pretty obvious points—first, it would run counter to how all of the other major oppression systems work (in which a false power dichotomy is created between two groups, both ultimately victimized by a third), and second, because men are very frequent victims of rape.  At the HC convention, Susan pondered out loud why men “still haven’t figured out yet why rape jokes aren’t funny,” and Connor responded that they just don’t understand the fear of rape because it’s not something they’re exposed to.

I thought of saying, “well, I suppose if you’re lucky,” but that would have been an epic downer and I had a projector to carry or something.  But it did remind me of the many people I know who have been raped.  I contemplate the Hobb’s choice of “do I not fight back and just try to imagine it’s not happening and hope that nothing else happens” vs. “fight like hell, maybe lose half my teeth or potentially get murdered, but make sure I leave enough evidence under my fingernails to send this shitbag to prison.”   I think of the people who were raped by their parents, or other family members.  Or bought from a foreign country as teenagers.  Friends forced to choose between situations, each with a high possibility of rape, weighing the odds.  People who had sex as children to pay for food.  And half of them weren’t women.

But we still fall victim to that same trick, that same mass deception, when the subject of rape comes up.  I bet if I said “IMAGINE A RAPE VICTIM!” you probably first imagined an adult woman.  It’s not about women, at least, no more than racism was about black people.  It’s about power, and people with power are greedy, and they don’t make a habit of letting a big swath of the population go about having it, intentional or no.  This is the great con of oppression, and since people don’t always follow me because I’m so funny-funny-ha-ha about everything, I’m just going to state it bluntly, that when I said straight people were harmed by heterosexism, and men harmed by anti-feminism, I meant it.  It’s hard to grasp because there is no straight white protestant non-disabled male happily wielding his privilege and laughing his way to the bank—these are just the dynamics of power, with indifferentiable masses of people exploiting them for their own gain whenever possible.  Sometimes they’re us.  The athletic directors at Penn State who covered up multiple shower rapes, and the priests who did the same at the Catholic church, could just as easily have been the victims had they been born fifty years later, and fifty years earlier, some of them were.

I said I would return to the first guy I kissed.

That was back when I was 17.  I had just come out of the closet.  I fled to Atlanta, and found people my own age.  Many of them worked as prostitutes, and started having sex for money around age 14 or 15—I knew them when they were a couple years older, and had found more long-term clients.  They still made quite a bit of money, but not as much as before, when being underage justified a higher hourly rate ($10,000 for a weekend).  One of my friends kissed me out of the blue one day, and I suddenly realized that nobody had ever kissed me before.  And at first I thought it was kind of funny that my first kiss was from a prostitute, and then sad that this was the noun he was reduced to after being disowned by his family and being a teenager needing a way to eat, and then, honored that the first person I kissed was someone who had survived so much.  Although he didn’t describe that trial as though he had been traumatized.  He described it in the same brushed metal tone as the guy I dated who had been violently held down, and forced to sleep on the floor afterward (he had to wait to be driven home, because he had no car and no money).  It was just something that happened, a fact of life, something to get over.  Be a man.  Get over it.  There was no shade of grey delineating which rape was worse than the other, just the flat tone, as though the pitch of rape brought every other emotion into a harmony of nothing.

So when I read these editorials, asking Representative Akin, or worse, men in general, to imagine the trauma of getting raped, my stomach twists up, in the same way that I think a lot of women’s do when they hear men making rape jokes—because a lot of men don’t need to imagine it, and I wonder why some writers still buy into that false dichotomy in these discussions.  Eve Ensler wrote to Representative Akin:

You used the expression “legitimate” rape as if to imply there were such a thing as “illegitimate” rape. Let me try to explain to you what that does to the minds, hearts and souls of the millions of women on this planet who experience rape. It is a form of re-rape. The underlying assumption of your statement is that women and their experiences are not to be trusted. That their understanding of rape must be qualified by some higher, wiser authority. It delegitimizes and undermines and belittles the horror, invasion, desecration they experienced. It makes them feel as alone and powerless as they did at the moment of rape.

I would bet ten million dollars that Eve Ensler did not intend her statement to read out male rape victims, and elsewhere she uses the phrase “person” so I am taking her out of context and strawmanning her statement, but it parallels how we all (including me!) take shortcuts when we talk and think about this.  But we should stop.  To discuss men as bystanders in the rape discussion retreads male victims’ feelings that as men, they simply can’t be raped, and if they were, they were weak for having failed to avoid it.

That’s not to say that the biggest losers in this particular dynamic aren’t women.  There are places where you can’t get an abortion without parental consent, even if a paternity test would show the person you’d need consent from was the father, as I learned from a friend who had a daughter at 15. Her story seemed the most depressing, perhaps because of the politicians who had so brazenly enabled her parents to force her to have the baby as punishment for getting pregnant.

But it’s hard to say.  One day I asked my first kiss about his roommate, the one I actually had the crush on and wished had been my first kiss.  (Damn you, love triangles!)  I thought maybe now the first kiss had moved on, and I could move in on the roommate.  The roommate had a face better than James Franco and a black belt and was able to ditch the sex for money thing at the (relatively early) age of 17 when he started building and selling computers on eBay.  “He shot himself in the head. In the bathroom.”  I almost dropped the phone.  I still remember standing on the dam, looking over the lake.  I wondered if his parents knew he was dead, but I didn’t ask.  I only wanted to know because I had fantasies of telling them myself, and that it was all their fault, and that they were horrible people, and then I could throw sand in their eyes and run off.  I would say that you don’t think rationally when you first hear about something like that, but 11 years later, it’s still what I want to do.  I should probably be more productive and blame society and act on that or something.

In any event, in regard to rape, as with all forms of oppression, to paraphrase Pam Spaulding, we’re all in this same fucking lobster pot, friends, and whether we’re near the top of the water or the bottom, we should be attacking the chef.

This is not to suggest that I’m posing this blog post in opposition to the previous one, which argued that women are best served if they brazenly, audaciously, vociferously, explicitly fight on behalf of feminism.  Rather, the point of this sequel is to say that when they do, they’re fighting for everyone.  Not just because we are all potential victims, but also because we already are victims, for the consortium we’ve lost with the people we loved, and for the void below the foundations of our emotional connections with others.

On the subject of rape jokes, the funniest ones I’ve ever heard have been this week.  Highlight: Onion Headline “Pregnant Woman Relieve to Learn Her Rape Was Illegitimate” and the (non satirical article but satirically headlined) “Todd Akin has secured the rapist’s vote, but who else’s?”.  So thank you, Representative Akin, for proving that rape jokes can be funny.  Fuck you for everything else.

If your chicken is marinated in pickle juice, what’s the pickle marinated in? Don’t answer that.

Face it ladies: Feminism is dead.

Just the other day, my Facebook dashboard was lit up with protests over Chick-fil-A’s assholery regarding gay people.  Gay people were irate about this excerpt from an interview with the CFA head honcho:

Some have opposed the company’s support of the traditional family. “Well, guilty as charged,” said Cathy when asked about the company’s position.  “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

The statement is actually more offensive to women than to gay people.  At least with the gays, Cathy doesn’t take it for granted that gay people are subservient. That’s why he has to throw money at keeping us down!

Let’s go through that second line, slow like…

We are a family-owned business, a family-led business…

Sounds ok so far!  The whole family helps run the family business!  How wholesome!

…and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that. [Emphasis mine.]

…and then everything goes to shit.  “We” wasn’t referring to the family–it was referring to the men who run Chick-fil-A!  Where have you been?  And none of them has moved on to their second-or-more wife yet!  Someone bring this man a cookie.  In this sanctimonious parable of biblical business success, it’s just understood that A) women don’t run shit and B) as first wife, your status is “first wife.”  Congratulations, you stove-tending baby-monitor–your husband is giving God thanks that you haven’t turned into an alimony vacuum!  (Find a pool boy.  Immediately.)

Don’t get mad.  Get everything.

No one else seemed troubled by this amid the storm of gay protest.  I’m the guy who, just the other day, told Jonathan, “I’m really driving terrible today.  Still better than any woman.”  And even by my standards, this statement from Cathy was low!

I am above nothing.

I asked Susan, while we were eating at O’Charley’s on the way back from climbing at Fosters, why women had so disastrously failed us all.

“It’s because if you complain about it, you’ll be written off as some screeching, whiny harpy, and nobody will want to hang out with you.  If you try to stake a feminist claim, people will just say you hate men, end of story.  And if you try to do anything serious about it, like sue, you won’t win, so the most you can do is just ignore it, otherwise you’ll go crazy, because you would constantly be angry.”

Was it possible maybe women just didn’t notice the anti-feminist statement from Cathy?

“No, we see that stuff everywhere, all the time.”

And on other climbing trips I’ve taken with women during which I asked about this whole war on women thing, the general feeling seems to be, “I am angry but I’m just not talking about it unless someone specifically asks.”  So, you’re not actually ignoring it, you’re noticing it, you’re just not responding to it, on the basis that if a response isn’t likely to generate change on the part of the attacker, it’s pointless.

Pants with…. no suspenders. Fuck!

It’s not that you, as women, are afraid to stand up and fight for your rights or someone else’s–the Facebook commenters proved that straight women are plenty willing to boycott (and publicly lambast) Chick-fil-A on behalf of gay people, and gay women are plenty willing to boycott Chick-fil-A on behalf of themselves as gay people, but both groups, bizarrely, see doing it on behalf of women as fruitless.

If there’s one thing the gay rights movement proved over the last thirty years, it’s that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that unending pressure despite overwhelming individual losses (eg. the vast majority of marriage ballot initiatives that failed, the losing BSA lawsuit, the first sodomy SCOTUS case) still generated huge success over the long run. The dark empire might win at court, and at the ballot box, and those Boy Scouts with their faggy uniforms are still banning us, but in the meantime, all your kids are gay, and so is your boyfriend, and your news anchor.  Surprise! The victory for the patriarchy for the last 99 years has been to convince women that they can fight valiantly for any cause, except their own. There are campaigns for things like breast cancer and domestic violence, which almost serve as surrogates to the cause, but nobody seems to spend their time fighting for feminism the way people fight for everything else.  Women will walk 800 5ks for breast cancer before leaning over to protect their vagina.  And rights related to possessing one.

You’re probably wondering by this point, why do YOU (as in me, as in Alex) care? Man? Do you just want to be that guy who’s cool because he’s a guy but he’s still about feminism and therefore deserves a cookie?

No. For one, I don’t even like cookies. Two, the reason I don’t like the whole patriarchy thing is just because it is seriously not working out for me at all.  No one has yet brought me a cute young secretary with cleavage who brings me coffee. When I was educated in school about women’s suffrage in the 1910’s, and how that was basically the conclusion of American feminism, I was like, clearly, I’m supposed to make $100,000 a year upon turning 22 and from then on I’m supposed to never make my own coffee again. Instead, half of my bosses and professors were women, who could be mean to me. And because they made significantly less money than their male counterparts, my bosses and professors were unresponsive to my demands that they bring me coffee. Or at least, I imagine that’s the reason, or they just didn’t know how to get to Starbucks, or maybe they stopped teaching that in woman school.

Perhaps we can reinvent feminism to be about selfishness for everyone, men included. If I’m not getting anything out of this system, other than making 30% more in the event I become a tenured history professor, I would rather just be able to wear eyeliner, because I have no intention of becoming a tenured history professor, and I make a really good Dracula at Halloween. It’s just like heterosexism and straight men. Are you aware of how many straight men feign an interest in televised sports because that’s what they’re supposed to do as straight men? Most of them do not care. When I am with straight men, they breathe a sigh of relief. “You know what I don’t care about?” they tell me. “Sports. I don’t know how many conversations I get into where this string of gibberish I don’t understand is coming out of everyone’s mouth about teams I’ve never heard of and I have to nod my head the whole time.” Bob Costas? He would rather be making biscuits. Straight men are abandoning the heterosexist normative paradigm not because of a sense of social justice, but because finally, finally we’ve presented them an alternative to memorizing batting averages, and it includes the ability to not feel guilty about jerking off their friend while they were drunk in college.

Now, I can’t expect to have any effect on the feminist movement whatsoever, because if lesson #1 in woman school is to not fight in the battle for feminism, lesson #2 is to not let a man tell you to do anything. Y’all will just have to figure that out on your own.

I was convinced there would be a poster warning that woman suffrage would lead to lesbianism, but apparently the terror was that they would be at non-air-conditioned city council meetings.

But I can exert some influence over the queer rights movement, being eleven years into it. Thus, I can make sure we recognize and use again the strategies that have worked, and in particular, kibosh this ridiculous notion that we in any way mishandled the Chick-Fil-A brouhaha. Chick-Fil-A probably won’t go out of business, isn’t likely to reverse course, and the haters had some success in reframing the debate as one about freedom of speech. But we proved that within hours of demonstrated asshattery we can provide a punishing economic disincentive to any major company, and not only flame the hell out of people who are Chick-Fil-A appreciators, even more importantly, we’ll shun the Chick-Fil-A apologists. Even the homos who got all whiney-faced about gay people not acting like genteel southern ladies, and who argued that we should accept the views of The Oppressors, were ripped a new a-hole and, at least on my Facebook, defriended. Some asked, “aren’t there companies and organizations worse than Chick-Fil-A? Like the organizations they were donating to?” And I say, exactly. We didn’t find the most morally reprehensible target–we found the weakest. We didn’t go after the company that was smart about hiding their anti-gay prejudices–we chose the one with the hapless spokesman. And in the food industry, where a minor shift in customer base can wreak havoc. The Boy Scouts came out with their bullshit proclamation within hours of Chick-Fil-A’s hapless interview, but the Boy Scouts own property in perpetuity and are funded by organizations with stronger barriers to economic harm from boycotts or cancelled contracts. We chose our target accordingly. That we have enough people with enough training to steer the movement in such a masterful way during their coffee break, such that our biggest mistake after engineering a massive, well publicized, still ongoing boycott is that the kiss-in didn’t go well enough (for shame!), is pretty good evidence that we have our collective shit together. We even let them believe that they had “reframed” the debate to be one about free speech. The assumption of a free speech argument is that you should be free to say things that are utterly reprehensible, and thus, the talking heads representing both sides were forced to begin with the supposition that Chick-Fil-A’s position was reprehensible. How is THAT for framing, motherfuckers? You just got so reframed you don’t even know how fuckin reframed you got. I would almost go so far as to say that Michelangelo Signorile’s “port mortem on the Chick-Fil-A battle” was a feigned, european soccer player case of crocodile tears just to keep the wool pulled over the eyes of the oppressors so they wouldn’t know how hard we just finished fucking them, but if so, Signorile has been the most dedicated con artist ever.  It would explain why he’s been pretending to be a horrible writer for so many years. (Editor: He’ll be crying real tears if he reads this. Me: He’ll never read this. Editor: I’m guessing he Googles himself frequently. Me: So do I! Editor: Yes, I can see the search reports. Me: You can see those?)

So, ladies–break out the lawsuits and the meme generators. Sure, your lawsuit will probably lose, and the company probably won’t change policy. Your advantage, should you choose to seize it, is that you can count on the oppressors being too clueless to realize that while you were losing the battle, they were losing the war.

Susan B. Anthony ultimately lost at trial and was convicted.

“We’re so embarrassed that it’s come to this,” Dan Cathy,  President of the successful fast-food restaurant says.  “When we were asked if we supported anti-gay groups, I answered yes…of course…but only because I misunderstood the question.”

Gallagher, attempting to lick honey mustard sauce off her jowls.

Cathy claimed that the Baptist Press interview in which he announced the company’s support of anti-gay groups clearly mis-interpreted his answer, and that rather than making financial donations, the company has merely been shoveling “tons of fried foods into that whale Maggie Gallagher’s fat fucking mouth” in an effort to quiet the controversial NOM spokesperson.  Cathy spoke in an exclusive interview with an anonymous HomoClimbtastic member who was simultaneously singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” into the business man’s asshole for $50.  “I’m just so ashamed, I hope my sister-wife never learns to read.  It would take days to explain to her exactly what happened here.  Oh yeah, that’s it, that’s it, Oh God yes, Oh…”

Cathy was later unavailable for further comment, but did tip the anonymous HC member $15 for teaching him a better method of sucking cock using a Chick-fil-A cup and straw.

President of Chick-fil-A Dan Cathy, learning the importance of proper lip positioning in keeping the dick away from the teeth

Fuck you, Boy Scouts of America.  Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.  Also, I happen to have this gigantic bag of dicks over here (always be prepared!), you can suck each and every one of them.

Oooooooooh….

You know, I’ve done this whole Goddamned research thing for the last 2 or 3 days in an effort to really counter the BSoA decision to hate fags, but then I remembered that climbers don’t come here to read well researched, reasoned opinion pieces about today’s hot-button issues.  They come here to laugh at the fucking insane bullshit that’s going on around us, because Goddammit if you don’t laugh, what, you gonna’ cry like a fucking baby?  Huh?  You some kind of fucking baby?  I’m sorry, that isn’t fair.  That’s the jet lag talking, I’m really sorry.

So here’s the deal:  I couldn’t sleep on my 14 hour flight to Taiwan, I’ve spent the last 72 hours in conference rooms that smell like a homeless guy’s sweaty nut sack,  I’m tired, I’ve been fucking sick, I’m hungry (I have to take a $15 cab ride from my hotel to get to the nearest decent vegan restaurant) and all of this just makes me even more sure that I’ve had it up to fucking HERE with groups of men who wear faggy uniforms, fuck little boys, and still have the wherewithal to tell gay people that we’re not allowed into your club.

Yeah, that’s right.  Turns out the Boy Scouts (a for-profit, $900 Million corporation) have a lot in common with the Catholic church.  They’ve been burying molestation cases for YEARS, and evidently have a secret stash of pedophile cases that they keep in some bunker outside Dallas, and have worked for the last 50 or so years to keep all of this secret because of the damage it may do Scouts as an organization.

Well you know what, BSoA?  HomoClimbtastic created a secret panel 2 years ago, filled with various members of the community (all of whom agree with us, because like BSoA, this ain’t a fucking democracy) and we’ve come to several conclusions:

A)  We fucking hate you.

B)  We fucking hate your uniforms.

C)  Those of us with children know that only 8% of child molesters identify themselves as homosexual in their adult relationships, meaning we know that our children are far safer with our gay friends than with some (now guaranteed to be) heterosexual scout masters.  Mike Huckabee apparently disagrees but mostly because he’s a man who makes a wonderful living pandering to the stupidest people on the face of our planet.  Also, facts are complex and often nuanced, which means you have to spend time dealing with them rather than watching re-runs of Jersey Shore.

D)  We hate it for gay kids that your organization, while seeking to create “morally straight” men, simultaneously encourages kids to lie about who they are on a very fundamental level so they can still be a part of your fucking club.  You are a very big part of the problem.

E)  We fucking LOVE the Girl Scouts.

Yeah. So fuck you.

I’m out.

(drop mike)

A duffel so large you’ll never have to use the hacksaw!

After you’ve finished wallowing in the amusement of my double entendre for “booty,” admire the fact that Voodoo Climbing is sponsoring us again!

With lots of stuff!

When I first heard about it, I secretly hoped that Gina was going to ship me one of their gigantic fuzzy crash pads, to my house, with my face embroidered on it, or maybe a naked gay porn star, or something.  But she did the next best thing, which was ship us a bunch of stuff to auction off for all of you at the super awesome July 28 HC auction.

So we’ll have chalk bags, duffel bags, tote bags, and a red velvet chalk bucket, the last of which has captured my attention, in addition to the on-site massage sesh being offered by Justin DiBenedetto (I anticipate a ruthless bidding war with Todd, which could get ugly.)

Not only that, Petzl sent us a GriGri 2, which is great.  Mostly because I force all of the people I teach to learn the GriGri, and thus am singlehandedly responsible for sending them a zillion dollars worth of GriGri purchases, so I’m stoked to know it’s for a company that’s all about keeping us high in the sky where we belong.  Same with the Evolv Shammies, although I don’t force anything on anyone in terms of shoe selection.

I know it’s easy to get cynical about commercial vendors sponsoring us and doing videos–it is true that they are for-profit entities, and it’s good marketing for them, and they make a shit-ton of money off us, blah blah blah.

But, to get more cereal than I usually do in my blogs, (and don’t worry, our humorous rebuke to recent events is coming) the recent Chick-Fil-A announcement REALLY HURT MY FEELINGS.  I expected an occasional bump in the road when carving a rainbow path into the climbing world, but not one when ordering waffle fries.  Waffle fries just seem like they would be a very apolitical use of tuber.  But commercial entities have the option, as our chicken nugget proprietor proved, of not sending you a red velvet chalk bucket, making you a video, sending you shoes, belay devices, coffee, what-not, and instead sending their spare change to ex-gay camps–marketing impact be damned.  They also have the choice to prop up the Boy Scouts–from which we’re all banned, in case you were wondering–even though we totes know way more about how to rig their top ropes and teach kids how to back-step than that idiot with the hat and the high-waisted brown knickers that accentuate his FUPA.

The Chick-Fil-A announcement stung (“I bought so many of your nuggets and THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME?”) but I have to say, I feel a lot better knowing there’s people out there who on faith will send a big box of swag to someone they’ve never met whose organization’s logo consists of two humping goats.  If that doesn’t at least partially restore your faith in humanity for a few hours, I’m not sure what will.