But “consensus gay culture,” an overlapping litany of overreach, is not what non-White genderqueers tell you it is.

• Rainbow flags. A design abomination (redesign) that has been retconned into proof of white supremacy. You’re a fascist if you don’t fly anything but the rainbow flag with black and brown stripes added (such hues not appearing in rainbows) and also the transgender flag, whatever that is. (Leather and bear flags don’t count; leather and bears are fascist [White].)

  But this imperialist symbol makes even less sense in monoracial countries like Taiwan. Where’s the “rainbow” there?

• Drag queens everywhere.

  • RuPaul.

  • Retconning a drunken cross-dresser into the heroine who “threw the first brick” at Stonewall (on an intact street with no bricks): The original lie about Stonewall by queer/trans*/LGBT+.

• Well-thought-out civil-union provisions replaced by “gay marriage.” In cold hard light of day, government-solemnized marriage should be restricted to male/female couples (no transgenders of any kind) because its purpose is support for procreation.

  • Self-evidently there is no obligation to procreate, and post-menopausal women may marry. (MTFs are not women.)

  • Same-sex and transgenderist couples can avail themselves of civil unions that differ from civil marriage only in name.

  • Religious institutions can continue to marry whomever they wish – gay Christian churches marrying same-sex couples under the reading of the banns, for example. This further means any kind of conservative, anti-gay, Orthodox, or otherwise restrictive congregation (and Muslims) can refuse to marry any pairing that isn’t opposite-sex.

  I just now have described France (under its PACS system) and Canada before the imposition of gay marriage. All the “queer” critics of “gay marriage” were right for the wrong reasons.

  But now every civilized country, and many Second World nations (Uruguay), have to institute full-on “gay marriage.” No, in fact they do not.

• Agitating for full legislative equality, and, when that is reached, continuing to agitate instead of closing up shop. Sign on for gays, then they’ll push trans* down your throat – and now pedophiles.

• An insistence that queer and trans black and indigenous people of colour (QTBIPOC, pronounced “cutiebyepock”) are and always were the progenitors of everything LGBTQ+. Though they invented everything (for which we owe them everything), QTBIPOC remain oddly “marginalized” to this very day, no doubt because White gay men “erased” them from history.

• Trans* everything everywhere, particularly in women’s sex-segregated environments. Bullying butch lesbians into thinking they’re male, then bullying them into lobbing off their tits and going on testosterone till they die, a bald-pated, fur-backed husk, of cancer.

• “Trans children”; Drag Queen Story Time. (Again: Pedophiles.)

• Masculinity as toxic, except for butch dykes transitioning to “men.”

• No male-only events. Autistic heteros at gay leather bars (not supposition). No female-only anything under any circumstances.

• A habit of locating the farthest-left political party, whatever that may be in any given area, and agitating only for them – to the point where endorsement of other parties is equated with fascism (Whiteness).

• A small catalogue of identical looks. Æsthetics that steamroller over even unique or distinctive cultures.

  • Fundamentally, within subphyla, you can’t tell gays (“in love”) apart from one another.

  • This guy is a Basque, with a name to match (Ãingeru Vilabrillë [no relation]). So is this other guy.

    Now tell me they have any distinguishing features whatsoever despite deriving from a distinct ethny and speaking a language unrelated to any other.

• Voices you can tell are gay with your back turned in a lineup at Starbucks (and irrespective of language). In this respect some things never change.

Consensus gay culture involves armies of aggressive, violent, habitually lying non-Whites habitually lying about Whites, who built the gay and lesbian community and foolishly didn’t just stop there. What we have now is already the worst instantiation of consensus gay culture that ever existed and it’s gonna get unimaginably worse. It’s the third gay holocaust – isn’t it?

Following up from my discussion of hard-to-read font sizes on iPhones, I bought a new pica rule and measured type sizes in points on an iPhone X. To do that I needed both my glasses and a loupe.

One could do all sorts of calculations to map pixels to points. None of that matters, because what you’re looking at has a definable point size, and that’s what I’m listing here.

• Point size means the distance from top of caps to bottom of descenders. (System typeface [San Francisco] obviates the need to compensate for ascender heights taller than cap heights because those two are the same.)

• ⁻⧸⁺ denote an unmeasurable fraction below or above an integer, though ostensibly that value could be estimated more closely if I bothered to map pixels to points.

• Bold vs. roman does not affect point size.

Q. Why do you come down so hard on skinny white girls? Your views on sexuality leave so much room for individuality, so why is it so bad if I am attracted to Meg Ryan or Gwyneth Paltrow?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: When have I ever criticized anyone’s fetish? I am a libertarian. Go right ahead – set up plastic figurines of 1950s-era moppets to bow down to in the privacy of your boudoir. No one will scold!

Then whip down to the kitchen to heat up those foil-wrapped TV dinners. I still gaze back fondly at Swanson’s fried-chicken entrée. The twinkly green peas! The moist apple fritter!

Meg Ryan: The spitting image of all those perky counsellors at my Girl Scout camp in the Adirondacks. Gwyneth Paltrow: A simpering sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs. I will leave you to your retro pursuits while I dash off to moon over multiracial Brazilian divas.

(Salon)

You will find but a single literary treatment of one of the more salutary and life-affirming male habits, and it’s buried in the otherwise harrowing Last Exit to Brooklyn. Selby does not just a brilliant job but the only job imparting a young sailor’s delight at just being in the presence of, having fun with, a pretty young woman. You can feel the smiles. Things end badly for the poor guy, who was just thrilled merely to be around her.

There was half a step toward a second literary treatment, but I can’t find it now after lots of trying. This is not the Ebert quote I remember:

Liz is tall [and] striking, carries herself with placid self-confidence, and wears dresses that display her magnificent bosom – not as an advertisement, but more in a spirit of generosity toward the world.

What I remember is Ebert talking about how a director decided an actress’s bosom was a beauty to behold, and we decided to agree. As ever, print the legend. [continue with: Musclegays sure love their tempeh and broccoli →]

• “I’ll see you at DataLounge Con ’94 at the San Diego Airport Hilton!”

  I am American male bisexual who is tired of crypto-muslims and antifas with post-modern neo-vagine doing force transgender on gays. Please to join me for DL Con Sunday brunch panel starring fellow American gays Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia. We discuss how Trump save gay men from being thrown off building by blacks, and how feminist destroy LGB by doing queer. Eat delicious borscht while the left eats itself!
  — Boris

• A genre of “porn star” (sample photo) of rampaging interest to a select few:

  You have that familiar and relatable look of a man that makes sure the power’s on that keeps the whole fucking world moving and not some piece of useless eye candy. A lot of homosexual men actually prefer your face to a runway-model or teen-idol type.

  There was a guy from the ’70s who did some nude pictures with the iconic photographer Jim French who represented the same archetype you do. He was flummoxed when he was approached to pose and even more so when he learned he was very popular.

• What Love, Simon was missing:

  • Rich hot douchebros from the prep school

  • Poor hot bad boys from the wrong side of the tracks […]

  • Jockstraps… clingy sportswear

  • A very bad accident

  • High-strung MAGA mother

  • Hot, trashy father of a friend who knows the kid is gay and says nice things

  • Really bad interiors

  • Kooky guidance counselor

  • Lesbian teacher and her bull-dyke girlfriend

I used to wear a veston designed and configured exactly like a fleece veston from any outdoor retailer but in a kind of silver lamé that blackened with every wrinkle. I still have it. A very different æsthetic from what I now wear. But it seemed technologically futuristic in an obvious way – crinkly metallic material.

There was a time when I would scour the so-called design press for new materials newly combined. I don’t have a picture or a reference for what I also don’t have – an amazing German hooded bomber jacket made of two kinds of novel materials fused together. This whole métier of combining mildly unusual materials is the value proposition of Outlier (“.NYC”), the New York retailer that is easier to like in theory. Outlier clothing sorely lacks colour and tailoring.

I recall the article in Wired about Jhane Barnes (apparently never onliné, except inasmuch as Barnes links to a PDF of it) and the fractal patterns she would apply to men’s shirting. I further recall actually seeing those shirts at Eaton’s and failing to buy them, stupid fucking idiot. (The common feature here seems to be “getting a write-up” in Wired. That’s how I found out about Outlier.)

“Futuristic” clothing, like heroin, is so passé. The real future clothing is antitechnological and tactile. We’ve been through this already.

Still, I have seen two “youth styles” that seem intrinsically futuristic.

1. So-called “kinesiology tape” worn by an Asiatic from an off-brand Oriental country. But he was in a sleeveless “technical” tank top manqué (obviously chosen with care) and the kinesiology tape on his arms was symmetrical and did not trace any actual muscle outline. It was just for show.

2. This one was also a sticker, but it had the pattern of a skull’s teeth but went around the lips and seemed to be anatomically correct for just the region it was covering. If I could find a picture I’d show you one. The fact that I can’t find a picture is proof this guy was functioning well more than 15 minutes into the future.

This one I haven’t seen in person: Purple camo spats.

(Complication here: Now spats also refers to the tights that [“ultimate”] fighters wear, or that CrossFit dudes wear under their shorts and knee sox.)

Camo, like Doc Martens, has been de-recontextualized and is now just a pattern. Ax me how many items of camo I now have.

The late Carol Channing held that “the safest place in the world to be is centre stage.”

It is.

I have never been even mildly afraid to appear onstage and hold an audience. Not exactly like Ted Koppel, who claimed that an EKG before and after the camera’s red light turned on wouldn’t show even a blip, I do get a normal adrenaline surge, but either it goes away or I use it.

I’ve been doing public speaking since 1989 and I’ve really borked it only once. I like to say I could host the halftime show at the Super Bowl and I want to be taken up on that offer, thanks.

Now ax me about that other time things went wrong and I’ll see if I can tell you what happened without accurately describing it.

I remember (in the late mid-’90s, when I was in my early late 30s) dropping by the Woody’s for some reason. As it was early evening on a weekday, one could hear oneself think. One could also overhear.

I overheard someone make a request of the DJ. I would dare to do the same. But all the while I had been watching, from mezzanine level, four or five of what I would later know as eldergays standing around, as one did in that century at what Rick Bébout called the Bar. I didn’t have words for it, but I remember not understanding and being vaguely repelled by their general mien, since they all seemed to be in good shape and well dressed (in Viyella shirts or equivalent – high quality even then) and were just basically having a great time.

My request came up. “Now: Iggy Pop!” the handsomest eldergay laughed loudly, and they all joined in. Yes, I had asked for “Homeboy” – a comeback novelty number, but nothing like the later music video for “Wild America.”

— America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

— Not so easy to do.

Indeed not.

Who’s the eldergay now? (But not a rock snob.)

User-interface conventions, invented by individuals from scratch, that went on to become actual norms.

hashtags

Invented by Chris Messina (q.v.)

Name coined by Stowe Boyd (American Dialect Society Word of the Year [q.v] for 2012)

microformats

Arguably the O.G. folk UI, and almost certainly invented by Tantek, inserting values into rel and rev attributes according to loosely-agreed-upon rules is still being done (e.g. rel="payment" in Overcast)

pull-to-refresh

Invented by Loren Brichter for Tweetie; it is now easier to list where it isn’t used on iOS

machine tags

Used almost exclusively on Flickr and now almost exclusively by me. Didn’t take off as microformats did

house icon to mean homepage

As distinct from skeumorphic floppy disc to mean Save. No officially encoded emoji is a clear candidate here (perhaps 🏠); people tended to use images

Next likely candidate

Procreate’s two-finger single-tap for undo (three-finger single-tap for redo). (As distinct from two-finger double-tap in VoiceOver [“Magic Tap”], which does the most obvious thing – if the phone’s ringing, it answers the phone, &c.)

Not really falling into the category of folk UI

• hamburger menus

• Alt‑Tab (so useful that Macs borrowed it as Command‑Tab)

• right-clicking

(Hat tip: Gruber.)