Well, Jay-Z and Beyoncé finally had their baby, which can only mean one thing: Here comes another baby song!

You know what I’m talking about, right? One of those intolerable, “Oh-my-precious-little-angel-it’s-a-miracle-that-you-were-born-unto-me” tunes that a songwriter is compelled to write every time he or she pops out another squirmer.

Whether you believe newborn babies are miraculous gifts from God or subterranean alien vampire-rats bent on draining your life force, can we at least agree that songs about babies tend to suck rusty buckets of contaminated amniotic fluid?

And this new tune by Jay-Z is especially abominable.

“You’re a child of destiny / You’re the child of my destiny / You’re my child with the child from Destiny’s Child / That’s a hell of recipe.”

OK. I want you to pause for a moment and marvel at the pure hideosity of that line: “You’re my child with the child from Destiny’s Child.” I want you to bask in the rays of its badness like a pale-skinned woman on an overpowered tanning bed; absorb the radiation of it on your face and neck—mind not the blisters and the hair loss— for a lyric as bad as this is a thing to behold.

Britney Spears’ “My Baby” is no less irradiated: “With no words at all / So tiny and small / In love I fall / My precious love / Sent from above / My baby boo / God I thank you.”

I want you to imagine that you’re Britney’s baby being spoon-fed in the kitchen, when suddenly mommy starts singing that song to you. Wouldn’t you eject the strained carrots onto her shirt and blurt, “Bitch, you better get your ass back in the rehearsal studio!”?

In Brit’s defense, “My Baby” sounds like a John Prine political ditty compared with Creed’s criminally negligent baby ballad, “With Arms Wide Open.” The worst part about that afterbirth is the video, which features singer Scott Stapp posing on a mountain top, his “arms wide open” toward the sky, his long, gorgeous Jesus-locks blowing in the wind and the fetor of a thousand soiled diapers blustering from his howl-hole.

Speaking of mucky diapers, Lauryn Hill’s baby song, “To Zion,” is a rash on the ass of all that is right and good. Lord knows Hill is full of herself, but how much of a messiah complex must you have in order to name your kid Zion?

And, look, I dig Stevie Wonder as much as the next guy, but “Isn’t She Lovely” isn’t. The melody is as mesmeric as a busted mobile, and all Stevie does is sing “Isn’t she lovely, isn’t she wonderful, isn’t she special” over and over again like a drill burrowing into the part of the brain that represses the urge to take sniper shots at random pedestrians.

I will concede that John Lennon’s song for Sean, “Beautiful Boy,” is lovely. But I often wonder how messed up it must be for Julian whenever he hears his dad gushing on the radio or jukebox, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… darling, darling, darling Sean”—given that Lennon neglected Julian as a child, which makes Lennon something of a parental dickweed, nullifying any fatherhood songs written by him.

The list goes on. The Dixie Chicks’ baby anthem “Godspeed” is in dire need of a spanking. “Prayer for You” by Usher should have been terminated in the first trimester. “Just the Two of Us” by Will Smith needs a circumcision—at the base. And it’s utterly impossible to keep your formula down should you happen to hear “In my Daughter’s Eyes” by Martina McBride.

And, yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Oh, Ed, you hate baby songs because you don’t have any children and don’t understand the miracle of new life.

Wrong!

You needn’t be a parent to understand the miracle of new life. Nor do you need to understand the miracle of life to scrutinize a song about the miracle of life, just as I don’t need to live in South Central L.A. to know “Straight Outta Compton” is a badass song about living in South Central L.A.

No, these baby songs suck for two simple reasons:

1. Childbirth is such an enormous, sentimental event in most of our lives that our emotions can be easily manipulated. You could write the lamest piece of cliché-addled garbage and everyone will blubber over it, leaving songwriters no incentive to compose something truly original and profound.

2. Baby songs never tell the whole story about parenting—no tunes about sleepless nights and bedraggled days; no odes about giving up your dreams, your friends, your drugs and your porn collection; no power ballads about how you’ll age an average of five years for every day you cohabitate with a toddler. There are no verses that mention that the only movies you’ll be permitted to watch for the next dozen years will feature talking cartoon animals and worse, a moral to the story, nor are there any refrains about how your sacrifices will go unappreciated—because they think it’s  invisible elves who stock the refrigerator and replace the toilet paper—and the day will come when not only will they not appreciate you; in fact, they will hate you. Sure as the babysitter will raid the liquor cabinet and blow her boyfriend on your couch, your children are going to hate your guts.

This is the thanks you’ll get for giving them life, because they are cold, cruel tyrants, and you are but a peasant who mollycoddles them. Hmm, I like that: “Cold Cruel Tyrant.” Now, see, that’s a baby song that needs to be written!

Well, 2012 is almost upon us. On Dec. 21 of that year—according to an interpretation of an ancient Maya calendar—the world is supposed to end. To that I respond, “Thank Christ Quetzalcoatl! It’s about frickin time!”

One of my greater pleasures in life is observing the hilarious backpedalings of certain crackpot prophets when the horrifying doomsday scenarios they champion don’t arrive. A recent example is radio minister Harold Camping, whose explanation for his incorrect rapture prediction was to claim that God was still collecting data. Then he predicted a new, modified rapture date, which came and went without so much as a single frog falling from the sky.

This is why I can’t wait for Dec. 22, 2012. Because there will be not one, but thousands of kooky soothsayers who will have to backpedal like hell once Mayageddon is proven to be horse shit. And I know it’s horse shit for three reasons:

The first is because I’m not an idiot. I realize, as a person with a full-functioning brain, that human beings are unable to predict what’s going to happen when they step out the door tomorrow morning, much less what will happen 5,126 years in the future.

The second is because the Mayas made no such prediction. This is a common misconception. There are no ancient hieroglyphs, no tomes, nor scrolls, nor scriptures that say, “Homies-of-the-future, beware! The world ends in 2012. Sucks for you, yo.”

“There are no Maya prophesies that seem to claim the world is going to end,” said Dr. Mark Van Stone, an expert in Maya hieroglyphs and author of Science & Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, in a KPBS interview. Stone said that 2012 is mentioned only once in any known Maya inscription, and all it says about what will happen on that date is that a minor god, named Bolon Yokte, will float down to Earth and “dress up.”

Yup, that’s what they believed. He was going to dress up, probably in some sort of ritualistic beak-and-feather costume, and prance around like a bird in flight.

Bolon Yokte: God of silly costumes

The Mayas never predicted an apocalypse. That was our own idiotic, superstitious interpretation of the fact that a Maya calendar “ends” in 2012. And I put “ends” in quotation marks because it’s not quite the right word. “Reverts” is the better word. There are no endings in the Maya calendar. In fact, the Maya calendar is not a single calendar at all; rather, it’s a series of 17 calendars, all of which have different cycles. For instance, the trecena calendar was on a 13-day cycle, the veintena calendar denoted a 20-day phase, the calendar round (a combination of other calendars) was roughly a 52-year cycle, containing the most common calendar, the tzolkin, which used 260-day intervals.

It’s all quite confusing and I barely scratch the surface of understanding any of it; however, for the purposes of this discussion, all we need to know is that the calendar that “ends” on Dec. 21, 2012 (called the long count calendar), is on a 5,126-year loop, after which a new cycle (or b’ak’tun) begins. So, saying the world will end in 2012 because that’s when the cycle reverts is like saying it will end on Saturday, because that’s the last day of the week.

The third reason I know that Mayageddon will not happen is because the Mayas were morons. Now, before I get a bunch of angry letters from MAAD (Maya Alliance Against Defamation), let me clarify: What I mean is, they were primitives—maybe not when compared with other civilizations of their time, but compared with more modern cultures of, say, the last 1,000 years, the Mayas were dumb as thumbtacks.

Of all the civilizations and religions in history that predicted different doomsday scenarios, we’re supposed to believe it’s these guys who had it right? The same geniuses who believed people are made of corn? The Einsteins who sliced open their penises with stingray spines to facilitate communication with deceased ancestors? The Darwins who drowned pre-pubescent children in order to satisfy a cranky rain god? The rocket scientists who divined the future by talking to birds. We’re talking about the Maya, who hung beads in front of their babies’ faces in order to cross their eyes permanently—these are your go-to guys for credible predictions? I wouldn’t let a Maya pick my next football parlay, let alone when I can safely start maxing out my Visa for an Armageddon credit blowout.

Still not convinced, crackpot prophets? OK, how about a bet? If the Mayapocalypse doesn’t arrive on schedule, you have to dress in a ceremonial beak-and-feather costume and walk around Horton Plaza with a sign that says “Bird brain.” And if the prophecy does come true, I have to give you my spot in the bunker I built when Y2K was upon us. Yeah, I know—silly me. But I was afraid I would get hit by one of those planes that were supposed to drop out of the sky.

Ed Decker
12.12.11

A few months ago, I bought an iPad for my wife. W had been hinting for a while that she wanted one, and when I say “hinting,” I mean telling me every day to buy her an iPad or she was going to staple my lips as I slept.

And boy was she happy when I presented it to her. For one short moment in time, I was the guy on the white horse in the Old Spice commercials who could do no wrong. Immediately after opening the package, she logged on to Facebook and boasted, “My honey just bought me an iPad! Isn’t he the most wonderful, greatest, bla bla bla and best husband ever?”

Naturally, this did not go over well with any of the men in our inner circle of family and friends— The Brotherhood, as I like to call them. In fact, it was my brother-in-law, Sage, who promptly Faceblasted me for going rogue.

What is going rogue, you ask? Going rogue is buying or doing something so wonderful, thoughtful, bla bla bla for your wife, that it causes all the women of the inner circle to blurt to their husbands, “How come you don’t buy me no iPad!?”

Indeed, in the few short minutes after W’s Faceboast, all the other wives of the inner circle—The Sisterhood—began posting about what lazy, rotten, cheapo bastards their husbands were for not doing the same.

Not that any of the members of our Brotherhood deserved it. They’ve all purchased excellent, spontaneous gifts in the past. In fact, it was shortly after the iPad debacle that Sage himself went horribly rogue. The little bastard—for no reason other than to express his devotion and bla bla blappreciation—brought his wife, Jessica, a bouquet of flowers accompanied by the following note, which she promptly posted on Facebrag:

“Dearest Buttercup, you are my sun, and moon, and gag, vomit, hurl. For you, I would climb to the top of the highest retch, sail the roughest bile, because I love you from the bottom of my barf.”

Make no mistake. This was a far more serious transgression against The Brotherhood because his gift came from a place of adoration, whereas mine was merely an effort to muzzle my wife so I could play Call of Duty in peace.

What followed was as hilarious as it was tragic. W was in the living room, scrolling through Facegloat on her iPad, when she saw Jessica’s post.

“How come you never do anything nice like that for me,” she snorted, holding the still-shimmering iPad in her greedy fingers!

Oh, well, that’s how it is with wives, I guess. You and she can be on the terrace of an Italian villa overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and still she’ll figure out a way to say “You never take me anywhere” with a straight face.

It’s just what married men must deal with and, since we can’t change women, the best we can do is stop throwing each other under the bus, because, up to now, the concept of going rogue has been unclear and discombobulated. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to clarify and, um, combobulate, the rules and definitions of rogueism.

There are three basic ways to go rogue.

The first, and most common, is buying your significant other a spontaneous gift—for no other reason than to express your love and undying bla bla blavotion—and, sure as Herman Cain was dropped on his head as an infant, it’s an abomination unto The Brotherhood.

The second example is buying a non-spontaneous gift, you know, during those gift-expectant holidays (birthday, Christmas, etc.), but spending far more money than anyone else in The Brotherhood is spending. For example, if you buy the missus a two-karat diamond for Valentine’s Day and the rest are doing chocolate and flowers, you have gone senselessly rogue.

Last, any of those creative and priceless-type gifts—like writing love poems, or having “Happy anniversary, darling,” plastered across the stadium JumboTron, or building a red carpet made of rose petals that lead from the front door to the bedroom, where you’ll be waiting in silk boxers and grasping a bottle of baby oil—are especially disagreeable to The Brotherhood, as they require planning, effort and—shoot me now should I ever go the silk-boxers route—passion.

Of course, in a perfect world, no man would ever go rogue against his boys. But we live in the real world, with real women—women with hormones that rage like barbarian marauders across the continent of your marriage—making it sometimes necessary to wander from the herd in order to prevent your lips from being stapled together.

In these instances, just be sure to notify The Brotherhood of your intention to stray. This way, it gives them the opportunity to buy something of equal value, or begin the quarantining process— which is done by dropping their wives’ cell phones in the garbage disposal, hacking their social pages and infecting them with some sort of influenza bug that will keep them from leaving the house all week.

So, men, are we all on the same page? Excellent! Now let’s all take the Oath of The Brotherhood. Please put your hand on our bible—1001 Fart Jokes— and repeat after me: “We, the proud, brave—yet war-weary—married men of The Brotherhood, do solemnly swear to go rogue only when necessary, to alert The Brotherhood when deviation is unavoidable and to reject Satan—The Old Spice Guy—for it is he who will lead us into the shadow of the valley of the doghouse, so help me Hemingway, amen.

Gallup recently reported that 50 percent of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana, while 46 percent remain opposed.

Well, doesn’t that just bubble my bongwater! For the first time, we can actually say that there are more rational, logical, free-thinkers in our society than idiot bovine who mindlessly devour the propaganda of the anti-fun fuddy-duddies who have lorded over our country for way too long.

Naturally, after Gallup released the report, all the anti-fun fuddy-duddies appeared on the cable news shows, rehashing their tired B.S. that marijuana is not a virtuous blossom grown from the mineral-rich soil of God’s green Earth, but that it’s a heinous pistillate fertilized in the hothouses of Hell with the blood and bone-bits of deflowered Girl Scouts.

OK, nobody quite put it that way, but there was an awful lot of fear-mongering, such as when David Evans of the Drug Free America Foundation told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing that “Marijuana use is going to double or triple” if made legal.

Don’t you hate when people make declarative, predictive statements about things that might happen when everybody knows that nobody knows what the future holds. Evans said that marijuana use is going to double or triple, not “I think it will” or “I believe it will” or “My gut feeling is that it will”– with “gut feeling” being an appropriate way to say it since double or triple is a statistic he clearly pulled from his anus. Actually, to retrieve such a ludicrous stat, he had to reach his arm beyond his anus—deep into the ravaged hinterland of his rectum, past the cold, crusty crevasse of his dying colon, up the snaky ravine of the intestines, where his fist waged an epic battle at the gates of the ileocecal valve (fiercely guarded by the Owls of Ga’Hole) and drilled into the slimy folds of the lumen, where poop and other poop-like matter (such as bogus statistics) are formed.

Double or triple? Please! There is no way of foretelling such complex matters of human behavior—especially when no one knows if legalization will cause the price of marijuana to rise or drop; or how much it would be taxed; or how much government regulation would be implemented; or how much, and what kind of, marketing will be permitted— which is why not a single, legitimate, scientific study has attempted to predict how much consumption will increase, if at all, and why Evans had no choice to but to retrieve that number from the recesses of his bowels.

Whatever. The job is to frighten the herd into submission. So, the fuddy-duddy cattle farmers spew their propaganda on cable news shows like CNN (Cattle News Network), HLN (Heifers Late Night) and, of course, FOX (For Oxen Only) News, and all the livestock on Mooing Moron Farms believe it—unquestionably—just as they believe that the slaughterhouse is where well-behaved cows go for a spa and massage.

My gut feeling is there would be a slight increase in usage if pot were made legal (about 10 to 15 percent), which would occur over the course of a dozen-or-so years, and my reasoning is:

1. Pot is already as easy to acquire as any legal drug and damn near as easy as buying groceries.

2. According to a 2009 survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 102 million Americans (41 percent) have admitted to using marijuana during their lifetimes, while 15 million (6 percent) admitting to using regularly.

Put another way, of the 102 million Americans who have tried marijuana, 85 percent of them did not become regular smokers, which suggests that there is a whole shitload of people out there who tried it and realized, at some point, it wasn’t for them. This suggests that it wasn’t a law that kept those 87 million people from smoking dope (or they wouldn’t have tried it in the first place); rather, it was their own disinterest.

There is something Evans said that did make sense. He said that when cannabis consumption doubles or triples, “all the costs to society will double or triple, as well.”

That seems reasonable. Whatever the increase in consumption—10 percent, 50 percent, double, triple, centuple—the cost to society will likely increase, respectively. Of course, the question then becomes, what are the societal costs of marijuana consumption and legalization? Is it the cost of manufacturing more cardboard Pringle’s tubes ? Is it the cost of pressing all those extra String Cheese Incident concert tickets? Is it the cost of providing emergency-room health care to uninsured reefer smokers who burn their fingers trying to light the last millimeter of roach? Or, is it the cost of hiring more IRS agents to collect and oversee the estimated $6 billion in extra tax revenue should pot become legal?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Didn’t Decker just attempt to predict the future by saying we will reap $6 billion in taxes? Perhaps. But at least I didn’t pull the number from my ass. I pulled $6 billion from a study conducted by economics professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University. Of course, he could be wrong, too. It is—study or no study—just an opinion. However, it’s an educated opinion, which is only my opinion about his opinion, but I’m right about my opinion—in my opinion.

The column was called, “Sons of Lame-Archy.” In it, I razzed the concept of biker clubs and gangs. The part that caused the brouhaha was a digression in which I lamented that none of the gay biker-gang names I saw online had any of that queer flair I love so much, like—and I don’t mean to re-inflame—“Hell’s Anals, The Sodomites and The Mangols.”

I meant no offense. They were just the kind of flamboyant biker-club names that I thought celebrated homosexuality, the kind of gay-biker-gang names that said, “In your face, homophobe! We are no longer going to ride in the closet!” The kind of biker gangs I would join if I happened to be gay or even entice my hypothetical gay biker son to join when if he was old enough.Among the swarm of angry emails, tweets, Face-pastes and blog-floggings were several responses from staffers of San Diego Gay and Lesbian News (SDGLN), including publisher Johnathan Hale, who reported my column to GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and assistant editor Morgan Hurley, who tweeted that “There is NO appropriate context for those types of words,” and wrote a column in which she criticized me for, among other things, not apologizing. That’s when the bees really started buzzing.

And while I received a lot of support from members of the LGBT community, a lot more sent very angry, accusatory missives, all of which boiled down to one or all of the following questions 1. Is Ed Decker a homophobe? 2. Is it ever permissible to use bigoted epithets? 3. Does Ed Decker owe an apology?

1. Is Ed Decker a homophobe? Not even close. My queer-friendly street cred is airtight. For starters, I have written dozens of columns in which I ferociously argued in favor of gay rights and viciously attacked its enemies.

Second, I, too, have been a victim of homophobia—in the workplace. True story: The company for which I worked at the time had transferred me to a new store. For reasons that don’t matter here, I was favored by the supervisor (who was thought to be gay), and an assumption spread that I, too, was queer. It didn’t take long before I was uniformly outcasted, ridiculed, sabotaged and—get this—poisoned.

Last on my list of pro-gay cred is the fact that—wait for it—some of my best friends are gay. Yup. I said it. Some of my best friends are gay. Why shouldn’t I say that? If I hang out with gay people, it sort of defeats the whole homophobe concept, no? Cases in point are two of my closest friends in the world, Danielle LoPresti and Alicia Champion (founders of San Diego IndieFest), who have appointed me as godfather to their newborn son, Xander Lucian, and have asked me to be a bridesmaid in their upcoming wedding. I haven’t decided whether I should go in drag; regardless, if a man agrees to be a bridesmaid in lesbian wedding, well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be long before he gets kicked off the Fallbrook Annual Aryan Homophobic Apple Bob and Barbecue Planning Committee.

The LoPresti-Champion family

2. Is there ever a time when it’s permissible to use bigoted epithets? Great question. Answer: Yes.

Ms. Hurley likened the FGGT-word to the N-word, which is a reasonable comparison. She also said that it was “never, ever” OK to use these words, which means I need only one example to prove her wrong. Of course, I have many (such as Louis CK’s hilarious and obviously non-hateful bit about the FGGT-word), Lenny Bruce’s various uses of the F- and N-words, but my favorite happened about a year ago, in the live-music bar where I worked.

That night, we had a touring band consisting of members of different lineages—two Africans, two Mexicans, an Arab, an Asian and a couple of crackers for good measure. When the night was over, the band and some of their friends drank at the bar while we bartenders stocked beer and closed shop.

Once we were all sufficiently intoxicated, one of the band-friends pulled out a camera-phone and announced that it was time to play the “Shout the Most Offensive Racist Slur You Can Think Of” game. Apparently, this is something they did after every show on the tour. It was an easy-enough game. Everyone took turns shouting the most outrageous racial aspersion they could think of, followed by a round of uproarious laughter, hugs and backslapping.

I don’t think I’d ever laughed that hard. There was something so freeing about it—especially the shouting part—as if the slurs were ostrich eggs we cracked against the wall and watched all the hate and anger—the yolk—of those words harmlessly dribble onto the floor.

When the camera pointed at me, I stopped what I was doing and shouted, “Niggers don’t tip!” The two bruthas leaped up from their stools and high-fived and hugged and complimented me for such exquisitely hateful hate speech—all of which felt so good I wanted to leap over the bar and make out with them both.

3. Should Ed Decker apologize? No, he should not. Because it would be the most bigoted thing he could do.

After having spent the last 17 years razzing Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Scientologists, Africans, Asians, Arabs, Latinos, Caucasians, Republicans, Democrats, athletes, musicians, sports fans, pot snobs, beer snobs, snob-snobs, women, men, cats, dogs, bikers, bar customers, bartenders, waitresses, MYSELF, my writing, my looks, my family, my friends, flight attendants, cartoonists,  parents, children, cheerleaders and guys named “Chaz” without a single “sorry” to share between them, wouldn’t it be patronizing to apologize now? Wouldn’t that assume gays and lesbians need coddling or special treatment? I mean, yes, absolutely, I am “sorry” that my words have been hurtful to some, but I do not apologize, because I did nothing wrong.

That said, I don’t want any apologies, either. For those who called me a “homophobe,” “bigot,” “hater,” “enemy to civil rights,” “ignorant” and “filth peddler,” warned me to  “watch my back” and spread my column around the country to stoke a response—no apologies necessary. In fact, I’m stoked by the ferocity of your response. I’m stoked that you mobilized against what you perceived to be a hateful voice, stoked that your  days of taking shit and cowering in shadows are over, that you’re increasingly more willing and able to shout, “In your face, homophobe!” Honestly, I’m so happy about that it makes me want to leap over the bar make out with each and every one of you.

Ed Decker
09.05.11

Epilogue: The letter from GLAAD

After I’d written the first draft of this column, I received a cordial, non-reactionary letter from GLAAD’s senior media strategist, Adam Bass:

At GLAAD we believe that a couple of your fictional gay biker group names used terms that were unnecessarily offensive.  The satire of the column was not lost on us, but we believe the jokes could have used different words to get the same point across.

The letter went on to ask that I not use words like “faggy,” “sodomite” and—this one took me by complete surprise—“homosexual.”

Because of the clinical history of the word ‘homosexual,’ it is aggressively used by anti-gay extremists to suggest that gay people are somehow diseased or psychologically / emotionally disordered…. Please avoid using ‘homosexual’ except in direct quotes.

Here is my unabridged response to him:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your fair and reasonable letter. As a life-long hater of homophobia, I understand why so many in the LGBT community took offense to some of the language I used. However, I must respectfully decline your request as I am a firm believer that what really matters in these situations is context.

A good example is the revelation (to me) that the word “homosexual” is now on the list of words I am not permitted to use.

First of all—and again, I say this with utmost respect and with no desire to offend—I do not recognize GLAAD’s authority over my vocabulary. My opinion is that there is absolutely nothing offensive about “homosexual.” It is—by its etymology—exactly what it defines, with zero innuendo. Homo means “same” and homosexuals are people who are sexually attracted to members of the same gender. It just couldn’t get any less offensive than that.

I mean, if we’re going to start indiscriminately banning words, I can think of one that is far more offensive than “homosexual,” yet is embraced by the gay community.  The word is “homophobe” and here’s why.

I think you would agree that the word “homo”, as a noun (not a prefix), is currently considered as one of the more offensive anti-gay slurs. Well the word homophobe takes the word “homo” puts it in front of “phobe,” creating a word that means “fear and/or loathing of homos.”

Whoever coined the word “homophobia” didn’t know what they were doing because an etymological breakdown of the word shows that the word is actually made up of a prefix (homo as in “same”) and a suffix (“phobia” as in fear) without a root word.

Technically, homophobia means “fear of the same” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless, you know, it is applied to someone with an irrational fear of cloning.

But that’s not what the coiners were doing. Whoever coined it was using homo as a root word – as in, “that guy is a homo” – and attached it to phobia, making homophobia more of a slur than homosexual. However, it doesn’t have any anti-gay baggage so it remains acceptable – proving that context is what matters.

I also took issue with the reason GLAAD says “homosexual” is off the table, that it was “aggressively used by anti-gay extremists.”

Well, sure , any word can be aggressively used by extremists, even polite ones, or, in this case, clinical ones. That’s the point. It’s not the word; it’s the context. And the reason that “homosexual” is the next word on the chopping block is not because there is something wrong with it; rather, it’s that there is something wrong with the way some people use it.

If we ban “homosexual” and make “gay” the appropriate term, bigots will eventually start saying “gay” with contempt, and in 10 years we’re back to the same place, banning “gay” this time in favor of the next acceptable word, and the next—killing word after word without understanding that no matter how many words we kill, the bigots live forever.

Thank you so much for your letter and the cordial tone with which it was written. I have great respect for GLAAD and its endeavors. Let me know if you need the gratis services of a spunky writer—I’d like to chip in.

Ed Decker,
San Diego CityBeat

I was zip, zip, zipping through Ocean Beach on my little, black and silver, 150-cc Lance Milan putt-putt motor scooter when I pulled alongside a real biker, dressed in full-blown biker-gang-guy regalia, leaning on his Harley waiting for the light to turn green.

We glanced at each other simultaneously. I nodded hello, and he—get this—laughed in my face. He looked at me, looked down at my bike—making a quick assessment about my manhood (which he identified as Level-7 Pussy)—looked back at me and laughed, out loud, real nasty-like. Then he turned away in disgust, as if a glob of bird shit had landed on my head and was dripping down my cheek.

It wasn’t a big deal, really. I know the score. Harley riders deplore scooter riders the way stand-up comedians deplore mimes. And pretty much everyone else older than 12 thinks scooters are a joke, too. Well, everyone older than 12 can suck on my skid marks! My ride is a beast. It goes zero to 60 in—well, actually, it doesn’t ever get to 60. But it can do 35, no problem—only takes a few minutes to get there. Then it’s zip-zip, putt-putt all over the place!

Seriously, though, for me, a scooter makes crazy-good sense: For one, it’s a huge money saver. The gas, insurance, registration— even the cost of the vehicle itself—combined, are only a little more expensive than renting a couple of Pauly Shore impersonators for a party. Second, I work from home, which means no long freeway commutes. Lastly, I live at the beach, where parking is scarce and traffic is fierce, making a scooter ideal because it parks anywhere and splits the lane to get to the front of the line at traffic lights—which is exactly what I was doing when I came upon the biker.

Now, for the record, I didn’t nod to him as though I thought we were badass biker brethren of the road—as if we had something in common the way, say, a Corvette owner would nod at another ’Vette owner, or the way black men in Alpine nod on the oft chance they cross paths. No. I nodded to him because we were standing right next to each other, looking at each other. It was a human-to-human nod for crissake, not biker-to-biker. I would never consider my little putt-putt job to be in his hog’s league. However, I’m also not going to feel inferior because my chosen mode of transportation doesn’t meet the approval of a man who cuts off the arms of a leather jacket with a hacksaw and thinks that’s punk rock.

When the light turned green, he revved up and peeled out, leaving me in a poisonous cloud of noise pollution, hate pollution and pollution pollution. And what I thought as I stared at the back of his motorcycle jacket, with the motorcycle-club iron-on patch was, He thinks I’m the pussy!? The guy who irons decorative patches onto the back of a sawed-off leather jacket because he thinks that’s punk? The guy who replaced the stock tailpipes on his ride with ones that are twice as loud, for no other reason than to be noticed and/or annoying? The guy who belongs to some juvenile social club with handshakes, passwords, parliamentary-style bylaws and arbitrary officer rankings? You know how those first meetings always go: “OK, so I’ll be the President, and Bear will be V.P., and Vulgor is the Road Captain, and Sammy “the Hammer” will be Sergeant at Arms”—and then you have the “prospects,” who are basically college-fraternity pledges, which is really what these biker gangs are, rolling fraternities, the only difference being that biker gangs have goofier names. Here are just a few nuggets of comedy I found on MotorcycleClubIndex.com:

• Organized Kaos (stifling my laughter).

• The Wastelanders (as if they were a gang of rolling marauders, scanning a post-apocalyptic hinterland for scantily clad, mute chicks and gasoline).

• Gospel Riders (who are, their website says, “Motorcycling for Jesus”).

• The Centurions (actually, I wanted to name my first rock band The Centurions—when I was 15!)

• The Star of David Bikers (blood enemies of The Gospel Riders).

• A Few Good Men (which is not what you think; though, you have to wonder how it was possible not to notice the gayness dripping off that name).

Speaking of homosexual bikers, I absolutely had to Google “gay motorcycle clubs” when researching this column. Alas, all that came up were totally inoffensive, non-hilarious monikers like The LGBT Motorcycle Club, The Golden Gate Guards and The Spartan Motorcycle Club. What a disappointment! I was hoping for some totally awesome, totally faggy, gay-biker-gang names, like The Sodomites, or The Truck Stop Cruisers, or the queer chapter of the Mongols Motorcycle Club—The Mangols. Or how about The Fag Hags, for a motorcycle gang composed of meth-addled straight chicks who follow The Mangols. Or, my all-time favorite gay-biker-gang name I just made up: Hell’s Anals.

I swear to God, I am seriously thinking about going gay just so I can wear that patch on the back of my sawed-off leather jacket. At least then, when I encounter one of these holier-than-thou Harley enthusiasts on my little zip-zip, putt-putt motor scooter, he’d have a reason to object to my presence: Because my iron-on biker-gang patch isn’t making fun of gay people; it’s making fun of him and his amusing fraternity, preposterous costume and obnoxiously loud tail pipes that he intentionally modified for no other reason than to be obnoxious and loud.

“Hey Ed, seems like you’re writing an awful lot about gay rights these days? People are starting to talk. Are you a queer?” –Jon

Not that it’s any of your business, Jon, but if I were gay you’d know it. I’d be proud of it. And I’d be good at it. I’d be the best damn gay in America. I’d bartend in all the hippest fem bars, wear all the crazy fem colors, say “You go, girl!” to all my fem friends and give these legendary blowjobs that’d make you go blind. Oh yes, Jon, if I were gay, you would know all about it.

I remember the day I discovered I was heterosexual.

Of course, I was always heterosexual. I just didn’t know it had a name until I started hearing the kids in school talking about this other breed of human beings called homosexuals. I learned that homosexuals were filthy, awful, rotten people who did rotten, rotten, awful, filthy things to each other and the best way to deal with them was to banish them from your clique, expose them as freaks and drive them to the brink of suicide.

But then came the day when I found myself asking a terrifying question, “What if I am gay?” I was about 16 years old and sitting in my room, on my bed, thinking about my pal, Jeff. People were starting to talk about Jeff and the long, ugly process of his exile was beginning. So I was sitting there trying to come up with tactful ways to terminate our friendship without hurting his feelings (how humane of me) and got to thinking how terrible it must be for him–how terrible to be losing your friends, and what if his parents ever found out, and oh man I could never tell my parents–thank Christ I’m not gay. Wait a minute. How do I know I’m not gay? I never tried it before. How do I know I wouldn’t like it? And if I did like it, would that automatically make me gay? Could I be gay? Holy Jesus Mother of Christ, what if I’m gay!?

I had to find out.

So I scrunched my face with anxiety and began the agonizing process of envisioning myself in some horrifying homosexual entanglement–hoping with all my hope that I would not find even the smallest part of it appealing. At first I imagined that it was with a friend, but that vision was too revolting to even consider. So I quickly replaced him with some unknown imaginary male, which was only slightly less revolting, and imagined myself on my knees, preparing to unzip this unknown imaginary male’s fly, and–and just before his phallus could flop out before me, my eyeballs started sparking and my ears started smoking and my brain short-circuited and the whole torrid anti-fantasy shut down.
Whoop-ee! I thought. I’m straight, I’m straight! What a relief. I felt like jumping and dancing and singing the “I’m not gay” song. The one that goes, “I’m not gay/ I’m not gay/ Hooray for me/ I’m so not gay.”

Today I was watching that MTV reality show, True Life. The episode was titled, “I’m Coming Out.” It documented four or five closeted homosexuals, mostly young, who were about to reveal themselves to their loved ones. They all went through one familial wringer or another, but the parent who enraged me the most was this one woman who told her freshly outed son that being gay was contagious, like a disease, and that he could be cured and all this other ridiculous dark-ages bullshit, and I just thought, Wow, what a pathetic witch you are. That’s your son!

You know, being childless, I am certainly no expert on child rearing. But I know one thing–if I had a son and he told me he was gay, I’d say, “You go, girl!”

I’d say, “Atta way to have the moxie to be different and the courage to declare it.” Then I’d take him on a shopping spree. We’d come home with bags and bags-full of all the great gay clothes with all the great gay colors; a stack of CDs from all the great new gay bands, like Rave Against the Machine or Lollipop 6, a dozen or so homo how-to books and manuals; and subscriptions to gay magazines with articles like, “Going Gay in 10 Easy Steps” or “What to Do When Your Fag-Hag Becomes Unruly.” Then, when he was ready, I’d nudge him toward the front door and say, “Now go on out there and be the best damn queer you can be!”

Not in my wildest dreams would I make him to feel a freak as that troll on True Life did. To reject your son now, when he needs you most, will do more damage to his psyche than every gay-bashing baboon he will encounter for the rest of his life.

This is why I write about gay rights, Jon, because of women like that, because of guys like you, because it’s the right thing to do and because at this very moment there is a huge group of our fellow Americans being discriminated against right under our noses. So I will write about how totally and utterly fucked that is for as long and as often as I like.

EJD
12/15/04

Day 1 (Monday, March 27, 2018 ):

I noticed it the moment I awoke; a peculiar feeling that somehow the very fabric of our existence had been altered in some terrible, irreversible manner.

I dragged myself out of bed, walked to the front room, looked out the window, and couldn’t believe what I saw. The sky was black and orange, emergency vehicles whizzed by, a dozen or so stalks of smoke and flame billowed from upturned automobiles, and a dog was trotting down the street with a charred human leg between his foaming jaws.

I retrieved the newspaper and read the headline: Supreme Court Decision Allows Gays to Marry: Very fabric of society torn.”

“Wow,” I thought. “The Henny-Pennies were right after all.”

I remember when it all began – back in July of 2003, when the Supreme Court overturned an archaic Texas sodomy law, thus making it legal for homosexuals to have sex. Naturally, that decision enraged and terrified certain people. They believed that this sodomy decision was the first step toward allowing gays to legally marry, and that would be the end of society as we knew it.

“This is one giant leap down the slippery slope toward Armageddon!” wrote columnist Harry Hardwick.

“This decision will have terrible consequences for our nation,” said Scott Lively, director of Pro Family Law Center.

“If we allow homosexuals to marry,” argued Sandy Rios, president of Families for the Protection of Marriage, “it will result in the disintegration of the fabric of marital sanctity. It will destroy the very fabric of society.”

The list goes on.

I remember thinking what a bunch of stupid, ugly, asshole bigoted, backward, frightened, callous, homophobic jerks they were. Oh how wrong I was – for today, all the dire predictions came true. The Supreme Court has made it legal for gays to marry – and the Apocalypse of Queer is upon us.

Day 2: It’s only been two days since the fall of straight marriage and already the electricity is out. I put batteries in the radio and listened to the Emergency Broadcast System. Reports were coming in that homosexuals were getting married in droves and roaming the streets attacking heterosexuals. City Hall had been sacked and the grocery and department stores were looted bare. I nailed down doors, boarded windows, loaded my 20-gauge Remington single barrel shotgun, and leaned it against the wall.

Day 3: Attacked by a gang of roving, married queers today. I was rummaging the alley dumpsters for food and became encircled by a small gang of leather queens. They were shoving me between them like a medicine ball and kept calling me Hechro (as in heterosexual). Then they shoved me onto the ground and kicked me repeatedly.

“No no no,” I pleaded, crawling to my knees. “I’m gay, I’m gay! Gay is great!”

They stopped kicking then, a look of curious indecision and empathy on their faces. Their leader – a hairy, leather daddy with “Judas Priest” tattooed on his neck – stepped forward and unzipped his fly. “Prove it Hechro,” he said.

I stood there frozen, unable to move. “I… I… I can’t,” I stammered.

“Hechro!” someone shouted. “Let’s get him!” blurted another.

The rest is a blur.

Day 15: Listened to the Emergency Broadcast again, but all they played was Cher, Liza and Barbara – 24 hours straight: All Day Diva Radio they called it.

I used to think homosexuals were just like regular people, but after listening to Diva Radio all day I’ve come to understand how truly twisted they are. I realized then – I must never let them turn me gay.

Day 43: I’m the last heterosexual alive. The rest are dead or cruising gay bars. A shanty town of queers has developed outside my house and they take shifts throughout the night singing the “We are the Champions,” and slipping gay porn through the mail slot. I am sleep deprived, malnourished, dehydrated – but staunchly convicted: Must. Never. Go. Gay.

Day 71: All Day Diva driving me to dementia. Cher keeps asking if I believe in love after love and I periodically catch myself staring longingly at the shotgun.

Day101: Nothing left to read but gay porn (found the articles to be well-written and informative). Also, discovered I prefer late-era Cher over early Cher. Clutch rifle tightly to breast. I am the last straight thread in the very fabric of society. Must. Never. Be. Gay.

Day 138: Can’t. Go. On. No food, but for insects. No water, but for tears. No TV but for the MANSEX channel. I reach for the shotgun, “Oh how I love you shotgun rifle,” I say, holding the stock to my chest. “Oh how your barrel is so long and firm against my breastplate. A perfect fit,” I think as I push the barrel shaft to the back of my throat. “Too perfect,” I think, wrapping finger around trigger and gently squeezing off a buckshot orgasm . . . .

EJD
07/09/03

Black Thursday

I was home when the lights went out, lost a little bit of work, but not a big deal. W. and I hung out by candlelight and listened to the transistor radio. It was pleasant and peaceful. Turns out we were fairly prepared. Lots of candles, lots of water, lots of batteries and flashlights and alternate sources of lighting. We even had internet. I have battery powered modem so, when W. went to bed, I watched Netflix on my iPhone. It was a thriller called House of 9 which I watched all the way up to the last 15 minutes of the dramatic conclusion, when the internet finally died.

So, there I was, awake and amped from the climax of a horror-thriller at about 10:30pm with nothing to do. So, I decided to take a walk down Newport Avenue just to see what was going on and maybe, with any luck, find a bar that was open.

It was an interesting stroll–fun and weird and dark and spooky. Lots of people hanging outside around fire rings, people throwing glow sticks around, some fireworks going off. People with flashlights going to and fro.

When I got to Newport I was delighted to see that the liquor store was open (those guys stay open no matter what). So I went in and bought myself a tall boy of Becks, and walked down to the end of Newport to sit on the seawall and watch the waves.

After about 15 minutes of blissful, Becks-fueled serenity, a drunk guy walked over and sat beside me, legs hanging on the sand-side.

I knew instantly this guy was trouble, mostly by his posture and the way he was dressed, which was kind of a faux-gangster style. He sat on the seawall, about five feet away, on my left, legs hanging over the sand, and slurred, “I’m sorry” to me. I told him he had nothing to apologize for and then, without a pause, he proceeded to go on a furious rant about some girl who had cheated on his friend, with another friend – in his apartment!

That was the part that really agitated him – he kept saying, “She fucked him in my apartment!”

Then he said, “sorry” again, and again I said, “No reason to apologize,” and then he slid over a bit closer. I thought, “Oh boy, this is not going to end well,” and proceeded to continue on his rant about the girl.

Now, here’s where it gets good.

He apologized again, and said, “I’m so mad, I think I’m going to have to punch you in the stomach!” He said it matter-of-factly, as though he were telling me he was going to get a donut. Then . . . he slid even closer! At that point we were side-by-side, so close we were almost touching shoulders.

I said, “You really don’t want to hit me, dude; I haven’t done anything to you.”

I said it calmly, but was fairly scared. Yeah, he was inebriated, which was advantage-Decker. But, you never know about what weapons these seawall kooks are carrying these days and if he was carrying a weapon, he was certainly drunk enough to not care about the repercussions of using it.

When I told my wife this story she asked why I didn’t just get up and walk away. The answer, I told her, is because I’m attracted and fascinated by bizarre people in bizarre situations. I can’t help but want to stick around – just to see where it all will lead. I guess that’s the journalist in me. A trait that has gotten me into, and out of, a lot of jams.

Anyway, he continued on the rant about the girl and, again, announced he is going to hit me in the gut, and this time, he actually delivered on his promise. In a near slow-motion attack, he hooked his left fist across his body, and toward my stomach.

Being that it was telegraphed, and not exactly at Sugar-Ray velocity, I easily deflected it.

But, I knew at that point he was capable and willing to make physical contact and that it was time to make an exit. A lot of guys would’ve knocked him out at that point, but I REALLY didn’t want to risk it, so I told him, “Don’t touch me again,” took a pull from my Becks, and pondered an exit strategy. I supposed I could have walked away, but was almost certain he was going to follow me, and, while pondering my next move, he again hollered something about that “Evil fucking bitch” and hauled off and punched me hard me on the arm.

It didn’t hurt much cuz it was just the arm, but it startled me and, in reflex, I shove-punched him with both hands so hard, it knocked him off the seawall and onto his back on the sand. Then I quickly stood up and started hoofing down the street.

The seawall was pretty high, he was very drunk, and I shoved him so hard that I doubt he was ever able to pull it together quickly enough to get up and follow me. But I did watch my back the whole way home as I huffed down Abbott, up the alley, and basically zigzagged back to my warm, dark house.

Crazy huh?