Another One Bites the Pulpit There are homophobic monsters whose fall from grace we’ve not-so-secretly enjoyed; and then there’s Donnie Romero, one of the most extreme gay baiters around. The nationally prominent pastor of the Steadfast Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, is quoted as saying that “faggots” should be “put to death,” and after the June 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he prayed on air for God to “finish the job” by killing the injured victims. And now Romero has resigned from his ministry for self-confessed sins of gambling, smoking pot, and hiring sex workers. In a tearful resignation, he told his congregation: “I have not been ruling my house well. I have been a terrible husband and father.” A church spokesman said that Romero’s main offense was the prostitutes—sex will always out-sin drugs and gambling for this crowd. Ranting about sins of the flesh, after all, is what launched Romero’s national reputation in the first place. As always in these matters, that fact alone should have tipped us off that his obsession with sex was more than just doctrinal.
The Look of Looksism Ressentiment rules the world, or so said Nietzsche, and he wasn’t the first to put resentment at the top of human affairs. Now a study based on General Social Survey data has shown that people who are less physically attractive are significantly more likely to hold anti-gay attitudes than those who are easier on the eyes. The researcher, Robert Urbatsch of Iowa State University, explained it as gently as he could—“People tend to perceive situations when they receive less than others do as unfair and unjust, and want to constrain such inequality”—but you know what he’s driving at. It is also the case that “looksism” has been an issue in the LGBT community. Gay men are often accused of it, notably by lesbians, who admittedly seem less prone to judge people according to their hotness. To be fair, many gay men are ashamed of this feature of our subculture, though the Iowa study might tempt us to feel a little less guilty about it. But, of course, the observed phenomenon is itself a product of looksism and wouldn’t exist if attractive people were not admired, and resented, for that reason.
Kim’s Karma There is some justice in the electoral defeat of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who rocketed to fame when she refused to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple after legalization in 2015. But then you add the fact that she was defeated by a gay man, and the “blue wave” of November 2018 gains a bit of extra froth. Davis lost to Democratic challenger Elwood Caudill by 54 to 46 percent, and since the election was all about Ms. Davis’ notorious stand on marriage equality—she spent several days in jail and became a darling of the far Right—it goes to show that there’s a county in Kentucky where gay marriage can get a pass. And a footnote: in the primary for the Democratic nomination, Caudill had defeated David Ermold, one of the men who had been denied a marriage license by Davis. Imagine if Ermold had won the primary and the election—poetic justice worthy of the Furies.
Ex-Gay Leader Erased It seems that if we wait long enough, anyone who rises to prominence in the “ex-gay” movement will eventually be caught doing precisely the thing that he has renounced and denounces. The latest to fall is Norman Goldwasser, an Orthodox Jewish therapist at Horizon Psychological Services, who gained national prominence with a 2006 paper that compared “SSA” (same-sex attraction) to obsessive-compulsive disorder and recommended a similar line of treatment. Well, recently he was caught soliciting sexual partners on Manhunt using the profile name “Hotnhairy72.” The sting was carried out by Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, when he made contact with Goldwasser, who was using the pseudonym “Dave” on Manhunt and offered to meet Besen at a Fort Lauderdale motel room. (“Hotnhairy72” also had a presence on Bear Nation.) The timing is noteworthy what with the movie Boy Erased in wide release, especially since Goldwasser was a funnel for clients into the Journey into Manhood program, where gay males are taken into the woods to participate in activities designed to “cure” them of gayness. These programs have a notoriously low rate of success, as witness the tendency to backslide into man hunting. One is tempted to say: well, there’s your problem right there. Taking a bunch of gay dudes into the woods for extended periods sure doesn’t seem like a formula for sparking an attraction to the opposite sex.
Deep Learning Scientists in Britain have created a machine that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to perform the perfect blow job. The development of “Autoblow” follows the publication of a paper titled “Analysis of Movement in Oral Sex Performed Upon Men,” based on 108 hours of nonstop blow job 
videos. The device uses a sleeve that slides up and down the penis to simulate human lips and mouth. What’s unique is the use of AI to learn through observation and neural network analysis the best techniques for getting the job done. Commented one of the developers: “We use quantization techniques to discover sixteen distinct motions, and using these motions we design and evaluate a system that procedurally generates realistic movement sequences using deep learning.” All this precision for what we thought was one of life’s sloppier activities! Which is perhaps the point: to make it less sloppy and more like the best you’ve ever had. Autoblow will sell for $249 and has a number of different settings, and of course it will be adjustable for length and girth. Capital was raised through crowdfunding for its development, and a record was broken when $190,000 rolled in, suggesting that there are a lot of guys out there who want to get their hands on this device—or free up their hands for other purposes (fast forwarding?).
