Putting my personal and political digust of Patrick Guerriero’s Reign Of Ruin at Log Cabin aside, the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger spoke in front of gay Republicans this week is big news. 

BoiFromTroy has a very good summary of the speech plus some photos.

“Whether you are gay or straight, everyone needs someone to love,” he told the crowd in Hollywood. “While we may not agree on every issue, we are united in the values of love, understanding and tolerance.”

Lighthearted and joking at the event, the governor was clearly comfortable with the crowd. He started off by saying: “I love the Log Cabin Republicans. I love this organization. I love all of you.”

Yick… just a little too mushy for me.  But I get the intent. 

Arnold’s speech has also resulted in one unintended consequence.  It appears Michael at GayOrbit has come out of the Republican closet! 

And while he and I disagree on what Log Cabin should be doing and how far to the Left it has drifted, his follow-up posting has some great points.

On the other hand, believing the Republican Party will change overnight is definitely delusional. Believing it can and will happen, and working to make it happen, is exactly what this country needs. If the American people admit defeat and don’t tell this administration, Democrat, and Republican members of Congress that they don’t represent what is great about this country, then nothing will change.

“low taxes, limited government, strong defense, free markets, personal responsibility, and individual liberty”…..That’s a good portion of what this country is all about. And people need to be courageous.

They need to take the insults lobbed at them by ignorant people and do what they need to do to change their party, and by extension their country, for the better. And it will happen. The Republican Party will change, and not because of people on the other side shouting insults and invective at people they believe to be sell-outs.

Great points, Michael.  Also, welcome to the sunlight!  *grin* 

But I also think it is worthy to note that those of us that want real change in the Republican Party also have a duty to speak up when the national organization that represents gay Republicans has become corrupted by those who want power and attention for their own agendas that have nothing to do with positive change within the Republican Party.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As I watched the rather mediocre movie The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green last night, I was reminded of a post I wrote in December 2004 when I was visiting my sister & mother (who, by the way, is celebrating her birthday today) in San Francisco. I had seen a drag show where the performers repeatedly made anti-Bush jokes and observed:

. . . the drag show I saw Thursday night reminded me (yet again) why it’s so difficult for gay people to come out as Republicans. Our entertainers take it as a given that we will laugh at anti-Republican jokes, no matter how crude, no matter how mean. Humorists assume that gay (and gay-friendly) audiences all cast Republicans as the villain. That we all see the world the same way they do.

And in the flick I saw last night the gay Republican was the villain. He was a caricature of an overbearing man, unlike any gay Republican I have met. Perhaps I read too much into this as a friend told me the movie (which he refuses to see) is based on a San Francisco cartoon strip where all the characters are caricatures — as they are in this movie.

To be sure, the flick did have its humorous moments, though far fewer than did the movie I saw the previous night — Nacho Libre. And that latter flick suffered from being fifteen minutes too long.

Ethan Green also had a few good lines. “One way to win the [dating] game is to stop playing.” And the protagonist’s mother did say, “Gay Republicans deserve to be happy.”

Too bad the filmmakers made the gay Republican into a boorish lout who appeared incapable of affection and unworthy of happiness. It seems alas that most images of gay Republicans in gay culture are caricatures. In Angels in America, Tony Kushner drew his gay Republicans as shallow, self-hating individuals, more akin to the left’s favorite epithet (“Jewish Nazi”) to describe us than on any actual, breathing gay conservatives.

I wonder if these writers have ever met a gay Republican and taken the time to get to know him or her — or if they just draw these characters from their imaginations, basing their screen (or stage) gay Republicans not on the complicated people that we are, but on the narrow self-hating individuals of their imagination. Thus, it seems these characters say more about their own projections than they do about the reality of gay Republicans.

It’s time I finish The Last Campaign, my screenplay featuring a gay Republican, based loosely on one I know very well.

-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com