Let’s face it: Carrie had all the emotional complexity, Charlotte had all the sweetness, and Samantha had all the fun. Miranda just had a briefcase full of neuroses.

So maybe it’s fitting that Cynthia Nixon put her foot in it in the New York Times by stating that she’s “gay by choice.” Ironically, as the lawyer in the group, I think Miranda would have been a little more careful in choosing her words.

In the Teabagger era, when estate taxes become “death taxes” and people who kill abortion doctors are called “pro-life,” words are pretty much a life-or-death issue. Now, Nixon made it clear that she was speaking only for herself—but the language, I’m afraid, belongs to all of us. She isn’t “gay by choice”: she may be in a relationship with a woman by choice, but that’s a different thing. The truth is that if you have a choice of which sex to sleep with, you aren’t gay at all: you’re bisexual. And would Nixon tell us that she’s “bisexual by choice”? I think not.

One would have hoped this issue was put to bed long ago by the Kinsey scale. (Ring a bell, Cynthia?) Sure, if you’re somewhere in the middle, you have lots of choices. (As Woody Allen famously said, bisexuality doubles your chances of a date on Saturday night.) But for those of us who are a little closer to 1 or 6, there’s not a whole lot of budging. I suppose anyone is physically capable of having sex with anyone else, but sexual orientation is about desire, not aptitude.

The truth is that no one gets to choose whom they fall in love with, or whom they’re attracted to. But bisexuals do have more options when it comes to sexual and romantic partners. And, to Nixon’s point, whether it’s a choice or a biological fact isn’t really germane to the question of civil rights. Unfortunately, the courts don’t seem to see it that way. Nor does public opinion. So it’s a little dangerous to put language like hers at their disposal.

In contemporary parlance, the LGBT community is a rainbow—not a monolith. And while they are all my brothers and sisters, my colleagues in the struggle, I would not presume to speak for lesbians, bisexuals, or transgenders. And I reject the notion that a bisexual woman can speak to my experience. In the interview, Nixon says, “you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” Well guess what, Cynthia? You don’t get to define mine, either.

Santorum is an occupational hazard for gay men. It doesn’t appear that often (most guys have the courtesy to schedule around it, if you know what I mean), but when it does, it can be quite a turn-off.

Unless you’re in love. And that was how I knew I was in love with Mort: Mort’s shit was just a fact of life now. I could deal with his shit and barely notice.

I’d fallen in love with his feet first. Actually, his feet were all I could see under the divider in the men’s room. Most guys use a simple Morse code—one or two taps just to inspire a response. But Mort didn’t stop there. No, Mort had a whole rhythm to his tapping. It was like being seduced by an invisible Fred Astaire. As I watched, those size-12 wingtips tapped out a jazz melody that echoed throughout the room. You could say he had me at ta-da.

And when one of those wingtips softly ventured over to my side of the divider and gently grazed my Top-Sider, the die was cast. I was already infatuated. By the time I finally saw his face and heard his voice, our future was set.

We didn’t see each other often—only when he was in town on one of his mysterious business trips. I figured he was married, and sure enough, he told me all about it one day. He even asked me to go to Bloomingdale’s with him to pick out a dress for his wife. She had a major event coming up, and he was the only person she trusted picking out her clothes. She would never know, of course, that the earrings—big hoops that were just the right size for cockrings—were my idea.

So everything was great for a while. Mort would call me when he was on his way into town, and I’d arrange fun stuff for us to do. Once I took him out dancing, figuring his toilet-stall rhythm would carry over to house music, but it was hopeless. Mort was all jitterbug and jazz hands. Frankly, it was embarrassing. But charming. He looked kind of cute out there, so willing to make a fool of himself.

Usually, I’d just make dinner and we’d spend the night alone. Mort could talk your ear off. He had one of those kindly preacher-like voices (albeit on the falsetto side) that make everything make sense. You think you can do just about anything when Mort encourages you. He asked me once if I thought I was really gay. My head was in his lap at the time. I looked up, wiped my mouth, and said, “Uh, yeah, why do you ask?”

“Oh, just wondering,” he said, leaning back to gaze up at the ceiling. “I hear there’s a cure.”

“Who wants a cure for this?” I asked, and went back to the task at hand.

I loved Mort. I could put up with the wife, with seeing him only once a month or so. I could put up with his two left feet, and the fact that he used his teeth a little too much (if you know what I mean). But then he crossed a line.

“Who are you voting for this year?” he asked.

I dropped a dirty Kleenex into the toilet and ripped the condom off gingerly. Over the running water—getting it warm enough to wash off any remnants of santorum—I laughed and said, “Obama, of course. Who are you voting for?”

And then he looked at me with a combination of fear and arrogance—a look I’d never seen on his face before. “I’m a Republican,” he said quietly. He squirmed a bit, like he was afraid I would hit him or something.

“You’re what?” I asked, my eye on his still-open suitcase.

I didn’t hit him. But still, that was the end of Mort. There’s only so much shit I can put up with.

The article details a study conducted in rural Brazil (imagine!) in which 35% of interviewed men admitted to having sex with animals, and their rate of penile cancer was higher than the guys who didn’t admit to having sex with animals. Now, aside from the obvious question—WTF?—I also have to doubt the study’s statistics: Umm, so you actually asked these men if they’d fucked a cow, and you expected them to admit it?!

Of the many things wrong with the story, though, it’s the political correctness that stands out. The writer treads so cautiously on the subject that she (!) seems to be normalizing bestiality. In fact, she introduced me to a lovely new word, and a new abbreviation: zoophile and SWA. “Zoophile”—it sounds charming, doesn’t it? Like, a person who loves zoos? Well, no, actually, it’s a person who likes to have SWA—i.e., “sex with animals.”

That one smacks of the old stand-by MSM, a moniker I first heard in the early days of the AIDS crisis, when they needed a way to describe “Men who have Sex with Men” without offending the down-low dudes by calling them gay.

But it gets worse. Like all politically correct stories, this one doesn’t waste any time in pointing the finger at rich white guys: “Men who have sex with animals in developing countries are usually poor and illiterate, with little or no access to hygiene, health care or the Internet, Zequi said. The opposite is true in developed countries such as the U.S., where SWA seems to occur in the educated population.”

That one really set my head spinning. Until I read the explanation: “Forty-five percent of the respondents worked in informatics or technology.” Oh, now it makes sense. All that Dungeons & Dragons expertise might get you a job at Zynga, but it can’t get you a date on Saturday night.

I’m starting to think that Rick Santorum’s fears are coming true: the slippery slope has arrived. Bestiality is officially the next frontier in human sexuality.

The article concludes with a real zinger, when the author quotes a urologist from Illinois as saying, “‘From a penile cancer prevention point of view, SWA should be discouraged based on the results of this study.’ He recommended standard safety precautions with any type of high-risk sexual intercourse: Wear a condom.”

In an earlier time, the advice might be a little simpler: Don’t fuck animals.

Still, I’d rather fuck a sheep than Rick Santorum. Even though he is strangely cute, in a stormtrooper kind of way.

But it had.

“Like it or not,” Simon said to me over brunch a few weeks later, “that was the moment. That was when I knew it was working.”

“What was working?” I asked. “His digestive system?”

Simon rolled his eyes and waved a fork in the air. “The relationship, you nitwit.”

“You judge your relationship by a fart?”

“Look,” he said, “that’s not something you do with someone you’re not really, really close to. I mean, how intimate does it get?”

“Farting is your definition of intimacy now?”

“Well, it was the first sign. If he was comfortable enough to do that in front of me, then I knew he wouldn’t be afraid to share other things.”

“Like what, vomiting?”

“Always playing devil’s advocate,” he said snippily. “You know what I’m talking about.”

And of course, I did. My ex-boyfriend farted in front of me, but he always joked about it afterward. In fact, one of his favorite games was Dutch Oven: he would let loose in bed and then pull the covers over my head to make sure I inhaled the intoxicating fumes.

But, to hear Simon tell it, Eddie wasn’t like that. He didn’t call attention to his bodily functions: he just did them, as if sharing that sort of stuff were the most natural thing in the world.

But where do you draw the line? I wondered. When does sharing become oversharing? How much intimacy is too much—physically or emotionally? Just how human do you want to be in front of your lover?

Every gay man I know (and probably most of the straight ones, though it’s harder to picture) routinely pees with the door wide open, or even with his partner standing beside him, at the sink. But when another friend’s lover walked in on him sitting on the toilet, it was nearly cause for a double myocardial infarction. As Bob opened the door and caught a glimpse of Keith, he screamed and staggered backwards, finally slammed the door like it was on fire. You’d think he had seen a zombie eating the cat rather than his main squeeze keeping the porcelain seat warm. But to be fair, I suspect that the only reason Keith didn’t freak out as well was that he didn’t want to upset Bob further.

There are taboos in life, certain things you’re supposed to do alone. And of those, number 2 is definitely number 1.

The line is a little harder to draw when it comes to sex.

Even Simon’s a little confused about this one. “He’s seen me masturbate,” he says. “I mean, that’s half of what we do together.”

For some reason, this conversation merits cocktails and darkness—none of brunch’s clear light of day. He toys with the swizzle stick in his vodka tonic and finally looks up at me. “So the other night, we had really hot sex, but I was too drunk to come. I was hoping we’d fool around again in the morning, but he just got right up and took a shower.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

Simon shrugs. “I don’t like to seem needy. And I was hoping, maybe later, y’know?”

“So what happened?” I ask. Simon’s practically sweating now.

“Well, we went out for a walk, and it was a really hot day. You know what the heat does to me.”

“Oh god.”

He nods. “Anyway, when we get back from the hike, Eddie sits in the chair to read the paper, and I lie down on the couch to relax. I have my eyes closed and I’m kind of dozing off, but all I can think about is fucking. I mean, I had it bad. You know what the heat does to me.”

“Yes, Simon, I know what the heat does to you.”

“So I put my hand down my pants and …”

“What’s Eddie doing all this time?”

“I’m not sure; I had my eyes closed. But after a while I heard him put the paper down and just sit there. I was afraid to look. I kept hoping he’d just appear by my side and, you know, help me out.”

“But?”

Simon shakes his head. “He suddenly announces from the other side of the room, really casually, ‘Well, I think it’s time for me to go.’” He starts to laugh. “You should have seen it,” he says. “I was like a teenager getting caught jerking off in the bathroom. I pulled my hand out of my pants so fast I practically castrated myself.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. And neither did I. I just pulled my pants back up and walked him to the door.”

“That was it?”

“That was it. Neither of us has mentioned it since. It’s like it never happened.”

Maybe, I thought, even intimacy is all about context. Just because you can fart in front of each other doesn’t mean you should be blowing taps through your ass every five minutes. And maybe masturbation is best kept to the bedroom—or at least somewhere where both of you are naked at the same time. Maybe a gentle tap against your pants with a come-hither look is as far as you should go without some sign of encouragement.

“Sure I’m embarrassed,” Simon says. “But it’s not like I’m ashamed of beating off. I guess what I’m ashamed of is that I was so brazenly trying to seduce him. I knew he wasn’t interested, but still I did it. That’s what made me want to curl into a little ball and disappear.”

“And did you?”

“No,” he says. “As soon as he left, I finished the job.”

“Good boy,” I tell him. “But did you make sure the curtains were closed?”

Barry took off his clothes so hesitantly, I found myself wondering if he were about to reveal a tail. “It’s a birth defect,” he explained, finally showing me. The hole in his foreskin was very awkwardly situated—more on the shaft than the head—and he could barely get it over the glans. It was as if he had put a poncho on sideways, with an arm through the neck hole. I couldn’t even imagine how the poor guy peed.

Apparently, the odd positioning of Barry’s foreskin made safe removal impossible, so his parents had gotten a special dispensation from their rabbi to allow their son to remain uncircumcised. It reminded me of how certain Catholics manage to get their marriages annulled by the Church despite the pesky reality of children.

Barry was embarrassed by it, ashamed of the glove of skin covering his dick. But the foreskin itself had no deleterious effect on the sex; only his self-consciousness did that.

Barry came to mind recently, when a controversy erupted in San Francisco. Last week, Gov. Brown signed a law forbidding individual cities in California from banning the circumcision of minors, in response to a referendum that had been proposed for the San Francisco ballot to do just that. When I posted a link to a news story about the ballot measure on my Facebook page, voices were raised, and someone—inevitably—referred to the measure as “anti-Semitic.”

If circumcision were practiced only by Jews and Muslims, that argument might hold a bit more weight. But in the United States, at least, that is simply not the case. I’ve seen a lot of penises in my time, and I can probably count on one hand the number of foreskins that were attached to them.

I was never properly introduced to my own foreskin. In fact, you could say that our relationship was severed before it had a chance to get started. So I can only speculate on how my life would be different if that little piece of flesh were still around. Rumor, and some scientific studies, suggest that removal of the foreskin reduces sexual pleasure—for both partners. Frankly, I’m not sure I could stand for my penis to be any more sensitive than it already is, but that’s not to say I’m not curious.

My parents (both Christian, but barely) had no particular rationale for this decision: in those days, they told me, it was simply a given. Circumcision was considered hygienic—sparing parents the trouble, I suppose, of teaching their sons how to clean their genitalia. Better to remove the hiding place of smegma than have to talk to your kids about it. Maybe, I thought, circumcision was just another example of our culture’s squeamishness about sex. I’ve heard that people once advocated it as a way to decrease masturbation. Good luck with that one.

One of my favorite memes of feminism is that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. I totally agree. And here’s the corollary: if it were illegal to circumcise boys, there would be no circumcised men.

The ugly truth is that men anxiously cross their legs at the mere mention of circumcision. In a post-Lorena Bobbitt world, they’re justifiably protective of their junk. One false move and kerplooey, there goes a lot more than just an extra flap of skin. I’m willing to bet that most men who believe in circumcision are glad they were snipped as infants and therefore didn’t have to make the decision for themselves.

That said, I’m not completely convinced that the practice of circumcision should be outlawed. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the jury is still out on both its advantages and its disadvantages. And parents, after all, have the right to make all sorts of decisions on behalf of their children, many of which have lasting effects. And if we’re going to start legislating how much trauma parents are entitled to inflict, the road will get pretty slippery. Frankly, if people had to demonstrate as much competence in childrearing as they do in driving a car, hardly anyone could get a license for it.

The Facebook flap—and this blog—caused a bit of controversy in my own household, as well. Chad just doesn’t get why I’m so interested in the subject. “I’m perfectly happy with my own cut dick,” he says—and I have to agree with him.

Actually, I’m suddenly wondering whether he knows I agree with him. Could it be that he thinks all my ranting about foreskins is somehow an aspersion against Little Chad? For the record, let me make it perfectly clear that nothing could be further from the truth.

That’s the irony, actually. To be perfectly honest, if I were judging a beauty pageant for penises, it’s unlikely that an uncircumcised one would make the final cut. But the search for beauty isn’t necessarily a reason to fuck with Mother Nature.

I spotted her one afternoon from halfway down the block—an overweight woman in a denim jacket, clutching Pooh-bear in one hand and the telephone in the other. I slowed down to eavesdrop (no, I am not above eavesdropping; it’s one of the most entertaining advantages of living in a densely populated area). And, as I passed her, I hit the motherlode.

“I don’t trust them!” she was yelling in a childish voice, stamping her feet and waving Pooh about. “They’re trying to make me look like the crazy one!”

Indeed.

Such eccentric characters are the bread and butter of San Francisco, as much the reason we live here as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Irish coffee. Several years ago, it was the homeless woman with multicolored hair and a vaguely British accent, whom we always referred to as Mrs. Slocombe. (Thankfully, no one ever asked about her pussy.) We would pass by her now and then, slouched in a storefront doorway after closing time, and give a smile of recognition, perhaps a few dollars. But when she wasn’t around, we’d give her nary a thought. Until she wasn’t around a lot. Until she wasn’t around at all. And then we started to miss her—the quirkiness, the odd stability of her instability.

And so it is with the Pooh girl. That first sighting was weeks ago, and it briefly gave me an interesting story for cocktail parties—but that was that. Out of sight, out of her mind. And mine.

Until tonight. On the way home from visiting a friend, I got on a bus I seldom take anymore, and there she was—sitting by the window, with Pooh in her lap. She was holding him upright, turned sideways to face the window: she wanted him to have a good view. I half-expected her to whisper to him about the sights passing by on the other side of the glass, but they rode together in silence, just the woman and her bear.

And suddenly, I remembered a passage from A.A. Milne, the one that gave Armistead Maupin the title for one of the Tales of the City novels. Piglet whispers Pooh’s name and Pooh asks what’s on his mind: “‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’”

I was on my way home to my empty house. My boyfriend and I spend three nights a week together, and this is not one of those nights. And when I crawl into bed in a little while, as I do on all the other Thursdays, I will clutch my ragged old teddy bear to my side and try to find my lover’s scent in his matted fur.

We all need to be sure of something. We all need our Poohs.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I love stories like this. There’s very little in today’s political landscape more satisfying than the exposure of hypocrites. Whether it’s Mark Foley’s attempted seduction of teenage pages or Larry Craig’s foot-tapping in a men’s room, I’m there on the front lines, cheering for more. (I should see if I can borrow some pom poms from Marcus Bachmann.)

When you sell your soul to the devil—i.e., the Religious Right—you have to pay a price. Welcome to the check-out stand, assholes.

The news on the Muppet front today is that, after thousands of signatures on the petition, the Sesame Street folks finally weighed in to say that the wedding was off—or, technically, had never been on. To wit: “Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics … they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

So there.

If Muppets don’t have a sexual orientation, then how do you explain Miss Piggy, the horniest heterosexual female on television, with the possible exception of Samantha Jones?

And Bert and Ernie, by the way, would not be the only married Muppets on Sesame Street. Granted, I haven’t seen the show myself in 40 years, but that’s where the Internet comes in handy. A quick scan of Wikipedia reveals a married Muppet couple named Ingrid and Humphrey, who appeared on the show from 1994 to 1998. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others.

I hate to rag on the Muppets (pardon the pun), because I really believe that the people behind Sesame Street have their hearts in the right place and have been at the forefront for years in attempting to teach children to respect all kinds of people (even the ones who are made of felt). But this argument sounds a lot like the mumbo-jumbo we’ve been getting from the anti-marriage crowd ever since Massachusetts in 2004.

Remember the good old days, when marriage was about love and commitment? When you watch a bride walk down the aisle in a white gown to meet her tuxedo-clad groom, do you think about their love for each other, or do you automatically picture them jumping each other’s bones after the guests have left?

No, in the broader cultural imagination, when straight people are married, they’re just married. When gay people are married, however, it means they’re fucking. The problem is that the average person can’t hear the word gay without thinking about sex. And they call us the perverts.

So I guess Bert and Ernie will have to remain like the gay couples in 44 of these disunited states—and just live in sin.

My response was clear: “Not at all. Maybe he’s a fag, but I’m just gay.”

Of course, the rumors started because the would-be First Husband is about as fey as a man can get—in the words of Jon Stewart, “not just gay, but center-square gay.” One listen to the sibilant voice, one glimpse of the jazz-hands dance style, is enough to make the casting director for La Cage aux folles want to run off to Minnesota to recruit him for the touring production.

The blogosphere is having a field day making fun of Bachmann’s fey ways—mincing down a hallway, lisping his way through a radio interview about “disciplining” homosexuals, dancing with Michele like he’s about to have a seizure. I have to admit that if I heard jokes like this about an out gay man who happened to be effeminate, I’d probably be offended. But when it comes to Bachmann, I laugh along with everyone else.

Of course, feyness alone does not a homosexual make. I have met the occasional straight man who irons his jeans and knows a little too much about flower arrangement. But when you consider Bachmann’s effeminacy in the light of his dedication to “conversion therapy,” the circumstantial evidence is a little hard to overlook. As Shakespeare, another celebrity of ambiguous sexuality, would say, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

So maybe it’s just semantics. On the schoolyard when I was a kid, fag meant “homosexual,” but then again, in those days of burgeoning puberty, homosexual didn’t mean much more than “sissy.” So who knows or cares who Marcus Bachmann sleeps with–or who he wants to sleep with? But if he is a homosexual, then he’s also a hypocrite and a coward-and those are kind of, well, faggy. His so-called clinic receives federal money while practicing a type of therapy that has been denounced by reputable clinicians as little more than psychological abuse. Homosexuality was removed from the list of mental illnesses nearly 40 years ago, but this crackpot still tries to “pray the gay away.” You might as well try to pray away the color of your skin, Marcus.

It’s the very notion that homosexuality needs to be “cured” that has led people to turn on this man so quickly, and to use his mannerisms against him. It’s the idea that he and Michele are probably royally pissed at the “accusation” that he might be gay—because, in their repressive world, homosexuality is indeed an accusation. (On the other hand, if I called her a fascist, would she find it a compliment?) Trying to cure one’s sexuality amounts to little more than sheer denial-and denial is the coward’s way out. True courage lies in accepting who you are in the face of prejudice and oppression, not kowtowing to the power elite and hiding behind your homophobic beard’s skirt.

A few people were sitting on the sidewalk outside the subway entrance–a couple of them in their birthday suits. (Again, a day without nudity is like a day without … you get the picture.) We figured it was another protest of San Francisco’s “sit/lie” ordinance, which dares to proclaim that the second syllable in the word sidewalk actually has meaning. It’s been an ongoing debate for a while, with the homeless and their advocates proclaiming that “sidewalks are for people.” I have to agree, but to me those people are called pedestrians—from the Latin pedester, meaning “going on foot.” As in “going on foot.”

But San Francisco’s progressive wing is never down for long. Somehow they managed to get benches installed at the corner of Market and Castro, so that the idle and smelly, while waiting for their high to pass, no longer have to sit or lie on the sidewalk: now they can sit and lie on lovely purple benches right outside my front door.

Today’s protest, however, merely coopted the sit/lie issue for another purpose. As I rounded the corner, someone passed me a flyer that revealed the afternoon’s main event: a protest against the Human Rights Campaign.

Yes, you heard me. The gay community in the Castro, of all places, was staging a protest against the preeminent gay rights organization in America. What, praytell, would give them occasion to find fault with the HRC? Well, according to the flyer, the HRC gave a score of 100 on its corporate equality index to Hyatt Hotels Corp.

The corporate equality index evaluates employers on how well they treat GLBT employees—e.g., having a nondiscrimination policy in place, offering domestic partner benefits, covering transgender procedures in their health plans. So you’d think it was a good thing that Hyatt got a perfect score, wouldn’t you?

Well, not according to today’s protesters. They marched from Castro and Market to the HRC office down the street because they didn’t think HRC should support a company that doesn’t pay its workers what San Francisco progressives consider to be a fair wage.

Once the black civil rights movement began to gain serious momentum in the 60s, Martin Luther King turned his attention to poverty in recognition of the undisputed fact that racial discrimination and poverty were intimately entwined, the one leading to the other and back. His political progression made complete sense and was clearly the right trajectory. Racism and poverty were—and still are—closely linked.

I hardly think the same argument can be made about poverty and homophobia, however. In the gay community, the perception of poverty is more often determined by what kind of car you drive, not whether you have a car; by whether you have a washer/dryer in your condo or use the communal one in the basement.

That is not to say that there aren’t poor homosexuals—some of whom, I suspect, work in hotels. But it seems an enormous leap of logic to assume that homophobia is the cause of their poverty to any appreciable degree. And if the link doesn’t exist, then why should an organization dedicated to GLBT rights be expected to also expend its resources on an unrelated issue?

According to this way of thinking, Hyatt gets no credit for its good GLBT policies because of the wage situation. You see, in San Francisco you’re not considered a true liberal unless you embrace every progressive cause known to humanity—homelessness, a fair trial for Osama Bin Laden, and the right of bicyclists to disobey traffic signals and mow you down in the middle of the street.

Only in San Francisco could a man like Gavin Newsom—or me—be considered conservative. Newsom’s efforts to provide “care not cash” to the homeless—i.e., feeding them rather than giving them money for booze—met with outrage from the progressive left. This reaction, for the straight man who put his political ass on the line by issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in 2004. In San Francisco, apparently, no one is liberal enough.

But, when push comes to shove, I’d rather be a conservative in San Francisco than a liberal in Wichita. Even these frustrations are part of the reason I love this town.