Since my first meeting with the TTC in nearly seven years back in August, every month somebody has found cause to call me a faggot on the transit system. (They never expect a comeback like “Yeah, I am a faggot, but at least I graduated from high school.”)

It would be excessive to say that has never happened to me before, but never so often, and I have no memory of the last such incident before this summer.

What surprises me is I am much more bothered and offended by the way the TTC treated and treats me.

What happened in Queer Nation in Toronto circa 1991? (Not 1985, as stated here.) We could ask Scott Thompson – or I could, if ever would invite me onto his podcast, whose ostensible final episode included this monologue of his (interjections elided, ≈40:00):

I always hated activism. Eeevery time I tried to get involved in an activist group, I was – sometimes literally – thrown out…. Thrown out of Queer Nation. Yeah. For being a man. Because they were discussing something— It was so bizarre. At that time, people were so polarized. And also sexual politics were feverish. So they’d have these meetings where they were afraid to have leadership because leadership was seen as patriarchal. Because men were more physical, they were in your face, and they had louder voices and all, women were like, “That’s an unfair advantage!” So they refused to have leaders. So there’d be a male and a female as co-leaders. So it was chaos. […]

There was a discussion about – oh, this is so stupid! There was a gay hotline, and the female leader went up and she was going on about the sexism of the hotline. How can a hotline be sexist? Because they were getting like eight times more calls were coming from gay men getting attacked than women, and therefore that proves sexism. So I put my hand up, and, even though I wasn’t supposed to [because] a woman had to speak before me and then someone in a wheelchair, when I finally had my chance to speak, I said: “Well, maybe that’s because women aren’t gaybashed the way men are.” The next thing you know it was like: Sexist! Sexist!

And I said: “Everybody in this room knows that gay men are the target.” Men don’t go out to beat up lesbians. It might happen, but it’s a one-off. You know? It’s rare. And that’s more under the umbrella of misogyny. But the truth is gaybashing is primarily about gay men. And I was thrown out. But thrown out for stating the obvious….

Oh, this would be 1985? Thrown out. I remember me and my boyfriend walked out at the time. I went, “I can’t stay in this stupid—” It was nonsense. I felt like I was in Soviet Russia back in the day…. It was like thoughtcrime. But look where we are today: There’s a lot of that going on. It never ended…. That’s my point. Whenever anyone is serious, all I hear is: Sexism! Hate crime! White male!

I remember being called “white male.” Like: “White male!” OK, whatever…. And most of the room was white males.

I actually have an anecdote of my own about Scott’s sitting a few rows behind me during and after my presentation on zapping Public Enemy.

(UPDATED TWICE) Dr. I. Alex Abramovich is a researcher specializing in homelessness faced by gay, lesbian, and transgender youth. Abramovich is an FTM transgendered person, hence is female. She is the figurehead behind a proposal to the City of Toronto with two primary aims – increase the number of existing shelter beds in Toronto for gay, lesbian, and transgender youth and build a separate shelter for such persons.

Abramovich refuses to acknowledge that her project has 100% support within the gay and lesbian community. Nobody is opposed to her project, least of all me. We all support her project even though its basis of statistical research is practically useless. A city report (PDF) detailing survey results from 2013 simply asked respondents “whether they identify as part of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Transsexual, Two-spirited, Queer (LGBTQ) community” (all capitalization sic). The highest affirmative response came from the youth-shelter system.

Quite simply this does not tell us enough. How many of these respondents fall into the category that transgender researcher Abramovich would surely insist is first among equals, namely “Transgendered, Transsexual”? (That’s two different things, isn’t it?) How many are gay males? How many of those males are actual real males and not FTMs like Abramovich? Earlier research I read, dating back to 2010, makes the same category errors.

Why are these disparate groups with disparate needs lumped together? Ask a lesbian what she has in common, if anything, with a two-spirited male aboriginal. Is it just that they’re both in need? Well, is that sufficient to justify “LGBTQ” shelter beds and an entire “LGBTQ” shelter operation? Should MTF transgenders, i.e., males, be housed with lesbians in the proposed shelter environment?

It is intrinsically credible that gay, lesbian, and transgender youth are treated worse in the shelter system. You barely need to back that up with documentation. But if you do, your research has to be bulletproof. It isn’t. Everyone in the actual gay and lesbian community supports the project anyway. [continue with: Nobody likes a sore winner, Alex Abramovich →]

The amusingly volatile Armond White, as if serving tempeh two ways, reviews Foxcatcher with one angle for Out and rather a different one for National Review.

(Pro tip: chickenhawk is one word in either of its senses. Also, Brendan Lemon paid me a kill fee for a “Talk of the Town” piece I wrote for the New Yorker about John du Pont back dans la journée.)

Recommended (inevitably) by Armond White was Patrice Chéreau’s Son frère, which, like Free Fall, approaches homosexualism from unexpected angles (in the latter case including who does so from the rear). (A later review by White. Chéreau’s obituary; all we can hope for is to be half as interesting as he was.) For some months I have been the eldergay on the subway picking through the atrociously typeset library copy of the original book by Philippe Besson.

One brother in Son frère is sick, only it isn’t with AIDS and he’s the straight one. The gay brother is removed from his own feelings and is played unconvincingly by a visible heterosexualist. (Both lead actors have Italian surnames.) The gay brother suddenly has to give a shit and do so with a commitment, gravity, energy, and stamina never before needed. His skinny twink bf unit deals with everything better – so much so that he and the sick brother become pals behind his boyfriend’s back.

The gay brother does not need to feel bashful or ashamed about hanging out at the gay beach or actually being gay.

Yet he does. Really, it’s hard for us not to self-censor. But he’s willing to speak with honesty after he makes out for a moment with his brother’s girlfriend. (With full commitment from the actor. You can see the blood pumping.) The only time the brother/actor can be honest is after kissing a girl.

Son frère restates the lesson of The Long Day Closes and Toast and it remains the hardest lesson to learn: Men will let you love them.

Son frère: It’s icy, it’s distant, it has a great ending. Yes, the sick brother dies, as he must. But then the gay brother finally changes. It took his brother’s dying for that to happen. That, like loving him, was all right too.

A week ago, Spiekermann stood me up when he was in town for the only time – presenting at the same design conference that in its earliest years invited then disinvited me.

I feel my lifetime interest in typography has come to naught. That feeling pervades all my interests, in fact.

(CORRECTED) Technically clueless journalism reaches another new low with “Twitter essayist” Jeer Heet, whose non-Twitter article:

• isn’t marked up as an ordered list

• keeps talking about enumerated entries when in fact entries on Twitter are numbered only if you treat Twitter like a Selectric and type actual digits. Twits read backwards, which makes top-posting sound almost responsible by comparison. (“One problem: keeping track of numbers. Sometimes I miss one” is another way of saying “Twitter does not support markup, which this article proves I don’t understand and could not use anyway”)

• fails to acknowledge that, while “Twitter essays” exist in some liminal sense, they don’t exist as an actual hyperlinkable entity, which is as good as not actually existing on the Web

• again acts as though having somebody else “Storify” (v.) your Twits is a valid method of Web publishing

Downtown Toronto journalists: Utterly technically inept and eager to reinforce their ineptitude to each other. They think journalism is Gmail and Twitter (and Storify manqués). Every downtown Toronto journalist is a low-water mark for every other such journalist, whose abilities, like their expectations of themselves, can never be underestimated.

Let’s also take a look at the borked Unicode on Heer’s site:

When alerted by E-mail to almost all the foregoing last week, including the borked Unicode, I didn’t get a response. But, apparently quite separately, Heer went on to write for the Globe a defence of everything he does wrong, using incorrect HTML to do it. (I left the wrong impression about cause and effect in the first published version of this paragraph, and that prompted Jeet Heer to write in. You’re reading the corrected version.)

Also separately and regarding a different article, my favourite Globe developer explained that the lack of ordered lists comes about due to lack of human intervention. That indeed would be the problem.

Unlike dyspeptic, soi-disant “support[er] of LGBTQ rights” Glenn Fleishman (q.v.), heterosexualist male technology writer/editor Jason Snell has grown and learned from his mistakes. When asked if he still stood by his claim from 2011 that everything I write is “infuriating and wrong,” Snell replied:

Was I wrong in feeling that Cook’s position as a gay man was “private” until he chose to make it public? Maybe so.

I see your point – which I probably didn’t see clearly in 2011 – that privatizing sexual orientation can be seen as feeding right back into the closet.

Did we all “aid and abet the closet without even knowing it,” as you wrote back then? God, I sure hope not, but maybe we did. If we did, I’d argue that it came from a position of empathy for Tim Cook. I leave you to judge if that makes that reaction forgivable.

In my anger over what I perceived as an attack on my writer and a Gawker invasion of Tim Cook’s privacy, I decided to attack you in public. I apologize for that. Your perspective deserved more credit than I was willing to give it.

Full props to Snell.

Next: Arment and the Macalope, and, as usual on a kingly perch all his own, Gruber.

After Valleywag made the case, I wrote in 2011 that of course Tim Cook is gay. Of course he is. The computer press indeed is so liberal it put Tim Cook back in the closet.

All the big names were and are guilty of this sin. Let’s start with Glenn Fleishman. At the time (2011.02.03), I chose not to publish the following posting.

Confidential to Glenn Fleishman

The respected Macintosh and technology journalist, who, like me, wrote for Tidbits, objects to receiving private E-mail asking him to articulate his points directly to me. He objects in public, in fact.

Here, for the public record, is our conversation:

I would assume that a journalist would all but automatically formulate any objections to my post and send them along via electronic mail rather than emitting drive-by Twits. Like most, I would prefer to be talked to rather than about. And I can handily defend my position.

I see: You’re the boss of Tim Cook and the boss of me.

Here’s how this works: I have a private life (non-journalist) and a public life (journalist). I get to choose what I write about, and when I make comments on my Twitter feed, blog, or other personal resources I maintain myself, another party doesn’t get to pull out the “journalist” card and make demands on precisely how I comport myself.

Short version: Fuck off.

Future E-mails will be ignored or blocked.

In the intervening time, Fleishman decided that he is qualified to police women’s discussion of transgenderism. Just yesterday, he described himself as a “lifelong support[er] of LGBTQ rights.” We’ll be the judge of that.

Everyone’s reporting, including mine, about Tim Cook’s being gay was correct all along. It’s reporting, not outing, because a CEO’s being gay is not “private.” Fleishman was merely the nastiest of a coterie of heterosexualist writers defending the closet.