fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
I opened the Oakland Tribune the other day and found a most shocking headline: “Mehserle asks appeals court for new trial.” I swear I thought it was a typo. Mr. Mehserle, as you may recall, is the former BART officer who feared Oscar Grant as a big scary black man and shot him at point blank range. Mr. Grant…
If you go back and look at the tape of then VP-candidate Joe Biden during the vice presidential debate, when he answered the question about same-sex marriage, you can hear in his cadence that he was following a script. Yes, he said, he and Barack Obama support equal rights for same-sex couples, but no, they…
{Editor’s note: This is the 100th post on the gar spot.} On April 29, the Los Angeles Times published an article which chronicles then-Governor Mitt Romney’s history with Massachusetts’ gay marriage law. It makes for very interesting reading. While campaigning for the governorship in 2002, he proclaimed he supported the rights of gay and lesbian citizens…
April 29, 1991. I was at work in Berkeley. There was no World Wide Web in those days. I checked. The Mosaic browser wouldn’t come out until the following January, over a half-year later. No, I got the news on the telephone when a friend and former roommate from LA called me while I was…
A corner. Just a corner. Not a fancy corner on a tree-lined boulevard with a landscaped median strip. No, it was just an ordinary corner, but a happy corner that saw the sort of traffic a corner would see when bordered by busy thoroughfares. There were streetcars, then buses, and cars, bikes, and pedestrians. Folks…
There are apologies and then there are apologies. Some are spoken in anger, before the true cool down has taken place. “Well, I said I’m sorry!” Reflection had yet to take place. The words ring hollow. A favorite among politicos, actors, and other public figures is the now-famous Non-Apology Apology. The typical NAA takes the…
April 15, 2012 was an auspicious day in North Korea. It saw the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il-sung. North Korea is known for much spectacle and pomp and circumstance, so of course an event like this meant pulling out all the stops. Planning for this date actually began…
(Editor’s note (4/11/2012): A link was added to this piece, in the first sentence, to a CBS News article which quotes Mr. Zimmerman’s now ex-attorney, Craig Sonner, verifying that The Real George Zimmerman website does in fact belong to George Zimmerman. It is on this basis that the gar spot accepts the veracity of the…
During the Prop. 8 campaign four years ago, I received a mailer from the Yes on 8 folks which featured black religious figures on one side and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on the other. It contained quotes like these: “Marriage is something that is sacred and worth defending as an institution of one man and…
March 3, 1991. Rodney King led officers on a high speed chase that ended in Simi Valley, California. When he finally surrendered, police took him out of the car, tasered him, and, as the now infamous video shows, kicked and beat him repeatedly as he laid on the ground. The officers claimed he resisted arrest…
