San Diego HateFest ’08

Nojo & Pedonator photoblogging live from the Yes on 8 Prayer Spectacular at Qualcomm Stadium. All times Pacific.

San Diego HateFest 08 [Flickr]
31 Comments

In other news, McCain gets the coveted Cheney endorsement! Just when they thought things couldn’t get worse…

I wonder if Ped and Nojo are able to comment. Probably not.

I hope they take pictures of themselves – I wonder what kind of disguise they cooked up.

Turnout looks a little small…

Can we comment at flickr? I wasn’t able to.

What is with the raising the arms in a “touchdown!” signal while praying? Unlike praying hands, that gesture cannot easily be turned into a billion tacky statuettes for jeebusy mantels and universities.
Nojo and Pedo, don’t get too close!! You don’t want to alarms the wild beasts.

@Mistress Cynica: It’s either like antennae to pick up the invisible prayer waves, or they just figure god is busy and they want to get its attention.

@drinkyclown: Damn I wish I could remember the snarky ditty that one of my drinking buddies recited last weekend when we raised our arms that way when we faked praising the lord while a bit inebriated. Age and alcohol the bane of my mental capacity.

OT. the sailor suit pic was really fine.

I’m glad the place was damn near empty.

I will eagerly await your summary. Congrats on making it out safely, but it looked like it was more L-A-M-E than anything.

Have a good night Stinquers! Off to a dinner party. Hopefully I will get so drunk when I wake up it will be Tuesday morning.

Totally lame. Qualcomm has a seating capacity of 71,500, and I don’t know whether the photos do justice to how empty it felt. Even where everyone was sitting, they weren’t exactly packing the sections.

One disturbing note: Definitely a young, multicultural crowd. Prejudice ain’t gonna die off with the Boomers.

PFC Pedonator’s Recon Repor:

Quite anti-climactic, such as. I just wasn’t feeling the hate like I thought I would, though until we got out of there my back was all tensed up. We arrived just in time for the supposedly 1.8 million strong Knights of Columbus corporate prayer.

What I learned:

The preachers kept talking about The Heavenlies — a Christianist take on The Honeymooners due this fall on the Family Channel, I think.

Every preacher we heard bragged about feeling the Lord’s hand in his back. I think they should have told the Lord, “a bit lower, please”.

Those of us against Prop 8 most likely experienced hurtful circumstances in our childhood.

Some on stage exhorted the worshipful not to hate the many protesters in their midst, to reach out to them…Nojo and I looked, but couldn’t find these protesters. (Could be they decided to skip Hatestock and go to the vigil and march tonight DJ’d by our Republican mayor, Jerry Sanders, at the GLBT Center).

The pathetically small turnout was surprisingly young and multiculti, as Nojo said. Unless those tattooed punk rockers, emo-boys, hippie-chicks
and somewhat boho-looking brown people (some even speaking non-English languages) were the elusive protesters. This would be scarier if I could really believe the event had attracted many more people than had been bussed in by their exurban mega-churches.

Nojo is a Costco virgin with a Promise to Keep. Me, I do the occasional one night stand with a big box store — but I never enjoy it and I never achieve Costcorgasm.

The fundies like monotonous, anthemic, stadium “rock” that sounds like all of Journey’s worst slow songs (like there are best ones?). Lyrics feature the word “Jesus” repeated about 5,000,000,001 times as the rythym builds slowly to tease the crowd without ever really achieving release. This music also makes them dance funny.

@nojo: Well, the younger generation playing their new fangled DnD in my apt right now (my kid is the dungeon master taking them through some campaign he based on a Lovecraft story), they call BULLSHIT on that type of intolerance. Some of his friends are gay, some are bi, and no one gives a shit. And I was raised fundie, yet I came to my senses. So there’s hope.

@JNOV: Lots of the youngest young’ns didn’t bother to lift their hands to the heavenlies. I think for many of them it was just an exciting spectacle, a chance to pal around with their fellow hooliganitos. There’s plenty of time for us to indoctrinate them with the Gay Liberal Freedom-loving US American Agenda.

I think it was the boho-ish late-teen-early-twenties contingent that gave us a bit of the shivers. Confronted with evidence against my own stereotypes (i.e., that person looks alternative, what is s/he doing here?). There are many flavors of alternative, must not forget.

That empty stadium was the best thing I’ve seen in a long time. I was thinking of you guys while we were watching The Mist, the last scene of which frankly freaked the fuck out of me and made me think Stephen King had maybe become a closet Jeebus freak.

I was expecting, well, the Republican convention: predominantly white, gray-flecked. I was also expecting the energy of a football game directed toward a chilling conclusion.

I wasn’t expecting a twenty-minute loop of jesus-jesus-jesus with modulating chords. I also wasn’t expecting to be bored.

@nojo: Well, it was your job to make it interesting, shouting, ‘Fuck my ass, Jesus! Marry me Jesus, fucking marry me, you fucking gay fuck god, you!” and throwing beer bottles into the crowd.

@nojo: Re “Prejudice ain’t gonna die off with the Boomers.” Have you ever heard patton Oswalt’s theory of raising children? That you should be uncool so that your kids will rebel and be cool? It’s obviously much more effing hilarious than that dry explanation.

@Pedonator: I hate it when Jesus freaks co-opt bohoism. Birks are called “Jesus sandals” for a reason.

@FlyingChainSaw: Haha!

@nojo: My impression is still that it was predominantly white, if not grey-flecked. “Minorities”, whatever demographic that means these days, may have been overrepresented compared to our expectations, but as we discussed, our expectations are shaped by lives spent mostly in the coastal regions.

The people on the stage were certainly hoping to direct them to a chilling conclusion, with all their emphasis on this as a war, that defeating 8 will have grave repercussions not just for the hallowed institution of marriage but also for the children, the schools, ye gods, even our businesses. Though quite how wasn’t spelled out, which gives me Hope, because the people raising their arms, swaying, then sitting down, standing up, and finally kneeling down at the direction of their puppet-masters clearly need things spelled out.

@FlyingChainSaw: Before we went, I thought I might pick out a nice Mormon boy and flirt with him. Then when he realized my “Tell me more about Leviticus” line was just a come-on and he started calling me names I was gonna say, “Thank you, and I’ll think about you while I’m fucking my husband tonight,” but alas, I didn’t see any overtly nice Mormon boys. Should have hung around that Land Rover from Utah a bit longer.

Its reassuring, in a way. Seems that the christianist anti-gays are at least not virulent, angry, violent. The real dangerous ones are the crazeees that Palin seems to attract, and my guess is that they probably aren’t religious, just hateful and angry and confused and generally fucked in the head. The spittle-emitting shitheads at the Palin rallies probably never go to church, they just latch on to the christian justification for being anti-gay and anti-everything liberal as a handy moral justification for their inherent hate, which is spawned of being a loser and not knowing why and desperately needing someone to blame.

These ones were just lame and seemed almost to sweetly believe that they are just trying to save teh gays from their sinful choice.

Speaking of hate, it turns out that the nice man who greated the 12 year old black trick-or-treater in South Carolina with a fussilade of bullets last night used an AK-47 assault rifle and fired 29 shots.

They’re doing everything to keep the racist part of this quiet. Shooter is claiming PTSD because he was robbed last year. Why, if that doesn’t excuse firing an automatic assualt weapon through the door at 8:30 on Halloween night because someone knocked on the door, what doesn’t?

Oh, and the shooters girlfriend was apprehended trying to slip out the back door with $7,500 in cash.

Someone interrupted them while they were bagging the latest meth batch, I think.

@Promnight: And so it begins…

Oh, wait, that kind of shit goes on all the time in this enlightened City on the Hill, doesn’t it?

And so it continues…

After that we need cheering up, and Sarah’s there for us. She got punk’d by a Canadian comedian pretending to be Sarkozy.
This and the Cheney endorsement the same day– Thanks, FSM!

@Mistress Cynica: Wow, turns out Terence and Phillip are real. They better hope Obama wins. Sarah isn’t quite as brain dead as she seems, at the end, she kept asking “what are the call letters of your radio station?” Trust me, if McCain wins, Canada city is toast, she was just trying to make sure we get the coordinates for the cruise missiles.

@Mistress Cynica: Thank you for brightening my day night. Not that you don’t always do that.

PS — where are the Yes Men when we need them most?

Hey gays, ya know, I made light of the degrees of hatefulness among those that think you are demonic, evil, and perverted, but really, its so fucking sad to me, that anyone in the world has enough time in their day to give a shit what hole you put the wiener in.

I learned at about 12 years of age that the wiener is happy with anything that provides friction, moist and warm is good, soft is good, the wiener is the most value-judgment free thing on earth. Rub it, it tingles and feels funny, and then it spurts and that feels real good.

Nothing the wiener does is perverted. Its only what the mind is thinking that can be perverted. If the mind only gets off when the wiener is rubbing on or in little furry creatures or strangers in subways, or struggling, resisting people who don’t want that wiener, or kids, thats perverted. If the closeted homosexual republican isn’t really into homosexual sex per se, as an act of mutual joy between consenting adults, but is really just into the perverse thrill of doing what they have internalized as an evil sinful thing, I don’t even think they should be considered as on the same plane of being with people who just feel attraction and completion with others of the same sex and enjoy sexuality for what it is, regardless of the gender of their preferred partners. Or maybe not, don’t know, I could be way wrong, I don’t know the wrenching conflict of having desires that go against all your received values, but it does seem there is something warped with these hypocritical dudes thats not present in the gays I know.

I am completely convinced that hate and homophobia are only possible in people who fear what is in their mind, who want their wiener where it shouldn’t be, whose minds have been twisted into obsession over where their wiener should be, and project their self-loathing on others.

I think they fear their weakness, they are afraid of their own wieners and fear they cannot remain in control over the simple, amoral desires of the wiener.

Despite all cliches over the “little head is in control,” its really nothing much to master your own wiener.

In the end, I wonder if homophobes (that kind of hate is only and always the product of fear) hate their own dicks, fear their own dicks, and thats why they hate homosexuals. They hate their own sexuality, they’ve been taught to hate desire and pleasure itself.

They are sad and twisted.

Its a fucking shame, its deeply saddening, that people obsess and hate over this stuff. It sucks.

@Promnight: They hate their own sexuality, they’ve been taught to hate desire and pleasure itself.

That’s really the crux of it. The only pleasure taught these days is that of instant gratification, the cold sterile consolation prize of a home fit for dwell magazine, a gourmet meal consumed in safe silence, the private pleasure of a good jerk-off session scored by internet porn.

How many of us even dream of another arrangement? For instance, one in which everyone did a little bit of the necessary shit-work, spent some time on food production, some time on a highly-educated specialty, and the ample leisure afforded by an economy not addicted to infinite growth for … pleasure?

4:20 photo is the best, not least of which, it was taken at 4:20. heh heh heh.

Master NoJo, to which photo jam should I send in my Dia de los Muertos pic of my St. Francis of Assisi shrine watching over the Unicorn and the Ghost of Molly Ivins?

Local paper: “At Qualcomm, about one one-third of the stadium was full and the playing field packed as TheCall unfolded.”

That’s being, um, generous. The 4:10 photo is probably the best crowd-estimate shot: Maybe a third of the lower-deck, loosely filled, and only the area in front of the stage permitted for spectators on the field. (We were sitting in the empty seats to get that view.) If the stadium seats 72,000, and they’re not even filling a third of one deck, my generous estimate would be 8,000.

@SanFranLefty: Next jam is Stinque the Vote, Tuesday morning. That might make a nice opening shot, if you want to email it to me in advance.

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