The Gay Pride festival takes place this weekend in the City of San Francisco. The LGBT community in the Bay Area is large enough and demonstrative enough to have prompted Oakland to host its own Pride Festival in September in the last few years. Thus, those of us who live here are reminded at least twice a year of the prevalence of homosexuals in our area and in the country at large.

Personally, I think it’s a disgrace. To my mind, there is absolutely no reason why the gay and lesbian community should still, in the twenty-first century, have the reason or need to hold a festival in order to discourage feelings of shame in being gay.

I mean, really, people. Homosexuals have been around for thousands of years that we know of, and probably since the beginning of humankind. Clearly they aren’t going anywhere. Get over it.

And people are getting over it. Like non-whites, like non-Christians, non-heterosexuals are gradually becoming a part of mainstream America. They’re characters on television, and in movies; characters with depth and style, not mere stereotypes of what homosexuals were once popularly supposed to be.

Yet, compared to other minority groups, there’s still a difference in the way gay and lesbian characters are handled in the popular media, and this, to me, is the crux of the matter, the yardstick by which we know that the homosexuals have not yet gained acceptance as a mainstream minority. Because so many of the roles featuring homosexual characters are not about ordinary people who happen to be homosexual, but about their homosexuality itself.

And that’s a crucial difference. Living where I do, I’ve met many gay and lesbian couples and the fact is, apart from the same-sex issue, most of them are basically indistinguishable from heterosexual couples. In my experience, most homosexuals don’t actually fit the “types” you’ll see featured if you attend the Gay Pride festival. Most of them are perfectly assimilated into a mainstream American lifestyle, and many more of them would be if the heterosexual community would simply let them. Being gay doesn’t mean they have different customs and values; if it did, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard for the right to marry. Shouldn’t we be applauding their desire to make permanent commitments to their selected mates? Doesn’t that make them more like the majority culture, not less?

Yet people continue to argue about homosexuality as if it’s a moral or behavioral issue and not a physical one. But homosexuality simply cannot be a choice, for the very logical objection that if it were, who in their right mind would choose it? Who would willingly volunteer to spend their lives being mocked and scorned and beaten and abused if they could help it? The fact is, there’s no overcoming the sexual instinct, not for heterosexuals, and not for homosexuals, either. And it seems to me to be both foolish and pointless to try.

Minorities will always be minorities, and to a certain extent, they’ll always stand out because of that. Indeed, this melting pot that we call America was basically founded as a haven for differing minority groups, and its multi-culturality only continues to increase as the decades pass, which is certainly not a bad thing.

But the day will eventually come when non-heterosexuals won’t have to be defined by their sexual orientation. When they’ll be able to be people first and gay second. When they’ll no longer need a Pride festival to champion homosexuality. Because no one will even give a damn anymore whether they’re gay or not.

I’d like to attend the Pride festival a few decades from now, when they make the announcement that it’s to be the final one. And if the LGBT members of our community are all at home or at work going about their own business, then I’ll know it’s time to celebrate the equality that they have finally achieved.

Starkey, Marion L., The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc: New York, 1949.

I wrote a report on the Salem Witchcraft Trials when I was in the seventh grade. Most of what I remember about it was having to deliver it orally to the class off of those stupid 3×5 cards, from which I read it essentially verbatim. Not only because I was incapable of spontaneous speech, but also so I would have something to look at besides the eyes of my classmates. This worked pretty well except that my hair kept falling into my face and I had to keep tucking it back behind my ears so I could see. I don’t think I would even have recollected that part of it except that all the kids made fun of me afterwards for playing with my hair during my speech. Strange the things children find amusing…

Anyway, being a native of Massachusetts, I was perhaps more drawn to this particular subject than I otherwise might have been, particularly since Salem was a mere two hours away from my hometown and we actually visited the Salem Witch Museum on a school field trip during my formative years. A skeptic even at twelve, I was impressed most by the illogic of the proceedings, in particular the torture devices by which “confessions” were sometimes obtained. But I can’t say I had a fair recollection of the actual historical events until I recently read Ms. Starkey’s fascinating and very well-written study of the subject.

Ms. Starkey, by her own description, decided to approach the Trials from a psychoanalytic standpoint, Freudian analyses of human behavior being tremendously popular in her day. Her theory is that the teen-aged girls who were essentially in charge of accusing the witches were suffering from hysteria brought about by the repressive nature of the Puritan society in which they lived. (She doesn’t go so far as to term it sexual repression, which perhaps would have been too delicate a matter to address in American non-fiction in 1949, but it’s implied.) Whether faked or not, the fits into which the girls dissolved, repeatedly and often, under the claimed tortures of invisible witches, did accomplish the objective of placing the girls squarely in the center of attention in the community. It’s certainly plausible that the people of three centuries ago suffered just as much from the illness of “look-at-me-itis” (as I like to call it) as the humans of today.

Now as you’re reading through Ms. Starkey’s history, it becomes apparent that the witchcraft hysteria that so rapidly engulfed the community did not really come about because the people were overly superstitious or inclined to belief in demons and witches. Rather, it arose because they were naïve. By and large, they simply could not believe that the stories the accusing girls told could be anything less than true. And if you have that kind of faith in the stories of children, then the idea of putting another citizen to death on the basis of spectral evidence alone doesn’t seem quite so outlandish.       

Of course, had there not been an underlying belief in witchcraft to begin with, no reasonably rational person could have overlooked the wildly evident illogic of the proceedings. For example, one of the most surefire means by which the allegations were proved true took place during the examinations themselves. The accused witch would be brought into the presence of the accusers, at which point they would cry out in pain, claiming that the “specter” of Goody So-and-So was pinching them mercilessly. Now, really. Why would any witch with even less than half a brain send her specter to attack innocent children right in the midst of her own trial, knowing that this would be taken as evidence of her guilt? And if these witches truly had the power to use their “specters” to do evil while their physical bodies went about business as usual, then what was the point of locking them up? And as time went on, the quantity of accusations and the quality of the persons accused both increased greatly, to the point where witchcraft of such magnitude would have been logistically impossible to have carried on unnoticed in such a small community.

There were those who made arguments along these lines right from the very start; one patriarch even “cured” a girl of her visions by simply threatening her with a lashing, and suggested that the same punishment be applied to the other accusers as a means of ending the witchcraft threat. And the community at large did, of course, in time, come to see the light of truth through the veil of hysteria and lies, but not before twenty innocent people were hanged for sins they did not commit.

Not even the most faithful of God-fearing folk believe any longer that the Devil possessed the old-time villagers of Salem and turned them into witches and wizards. But, if you believe in that kind of thing, you could conceivably make the argument that the Devil was, indeed, in Massachusetts in 1692. Not the Devil who hosts Black Sabbaths, acquires the souls of young girls by forcing them to sign their names in a book of his legions, and accompanies his servants in the forms of familiars like black cats and snakes, but the Devil who works his evil in underhanded ways: by entering the hearts of good, worthy citizens and turning them horribly and pitilessly against one another.  
 

https://avbc.com/ai1ec_event/boonville-ca-17th-annual-legendary-boonville-beer-fest/?instance_id=196

The 17th Annual Legendary Boonville Beer Festival: The bahlest steinber hornin’, chiggrul gormin’ tidrick in the heelch of the Boont Region!

Or so they say up at Anderson Valley Brewing Company, where they host this annual event at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds.

Now I can’t say that Boonville is my favorite of the beer festivals I regularly attend. In fact, in my book, it pales by comparison to the festivals at The Bistro in Hayward, most notable of which are the Double IPA festival in February and the Wood-Aged festival in November. In terms of selection and style, these fests offer a larger variety of the kinds of beers I really, really like, and more importantly, they tend to feature a greater number of beers I simply don’t see in my regional market.

However, no local beer festival can match the power of Boonville for sheer good time. That’s because it’s not merely a beer festival; it’s a weekend-long party complete with camping, barbecuing, loud music, and vast numbers of otherwise quiet, sober people generally making drunken asses of themselves. Not me, of course, because to the best of my recollection I have never, ever made a fool of myself, and I’m quite certain that all of the stories concerning my behavior during my rare nights of overindulging have been entirely fabricated.

I won’t regale you with noteworthy tales of prior Boonvilles, many of which are incredibly embarrassing either to me personally or to people dear to my heart, but here are a few of the life-changing observations I made at this year’s festival:

Bright, sunny and ninety-five is way better than rainy, muddy, and fifty-five, especially when your friends who arrive first are smart enough and early enough to pick out a shady camping site.
A wise woman drinks beer with breakfast, not before.
Patience is a virtue that women develop while waiting in line for the “real” bathroom when the Port-A-Potties are full.
Patience is a virtue that men develop while waiting for women to emerge from the “real” bathroom.
A man who is so anxious to get a beer that he shoves a woman out of his way has no right to complain when she shoves back. Not even if, in so doing, she spills said beer.
A true friend is someone who waits with you in the line for the Port-A-Potty just to be able to hold your beer while you’re in there.
Plastic cups don’t break with the same joyful ringing clarity as glass ones, but at least no one loses an eye.
It’s rarely worth standing in the long line for that special beer that some brewery always decides to put on exactly at four o’clock, but you’ll be sorry if you don’t do it anyway.
You can’t appreciate really good beer until you have some bad ones.
Caterpillars do not improve the flavor of tenderloin.
Just because there’s a bridge doesn’t mean there’s anything special on the other side of it.
Dancing on the roof of an RV does not make you look foolish. Dancing unenthusiastically does.
Friends are people who can drink with you all weekend and still like you afterwards.
Blessed are they who for once find a quiet camping spot and don’t have to listen to those #$^@&$! jerks screaming and running around all night.
Everyone looks like crap the morning after a beer festival, either because they drank too much or because you did.
Choose your first three beers well; by the end of the festival, they will be the only ones you remember.