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When Nintendo claimed that the Wii would appeal to a broad audience of consumers, they were not kidding around.  While the Nintendo Wii plays a favorite among little kids and grandmas, it has much love from the gay community.  Gay people like to stay fit and games like Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort, and WiiFit allow them to keep in shape so they can look sexy in hopes of scoring with a handsome hunk.  Now while gay people like to stay in shape, they are not exactly the most masculine and muscular people in the world.  Most gay people wouldn’t choose an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 because it is too heavy for them to carry around.  A gay person’s body is not built to carry around large, heavy consoles.  The Wii is small, light, white, and sleek.  Now, even though gay people might not like the Wii’s design and color as much as the GameCube’s purple purse design, it still looks nice to place in a home without worrying about it looking bad.

We did multiple polls on message boards such as Gamespot, 1UP, and IGN, asking if they were straight, gay, or bisexual.  The results were astounding.  The poll results showed that there were more gay owners who own the Wii more than any other console.  After completely the study, we asked them why they like the Wii over the 360/Playstation 3.  They told us they didn’t like how 360/PS3 games had so many dark games with brown/black/grey color palettes.  Usually straight men like games with darker colors because it makes them feel more manly and adult.  While we noticed that gay people tend to enjoy brighter color palettes such as red, yellow, orange, etc in games such as Super Mario Galaxy.  I once knew someone who was gay and he always talked about the colors and art styles of videogames.  The more stylish and artistic, the more gay people are more willing to play that game.  While another friend of mine who was straight, cared more if the visuals were realistic and looked like real life.  Straight people like graphics to look more like real life and less cartoonish.  Straight tend to enjoy games involving killing people or sports, while gay people tend to enjoy games about running around in a colorful fantasy world full of talking animals, colorful creatures, and magic.  Now, this doesn’t mean all people who enjoy games like that gay.  But I believe most of them are.

Gay people love to make great gourmet food and the Wii allows them to do that in a videogame such as Cooking Mama.  Cooking Mama is a great game for homosexuals because it allows you to be a great chef and create excellent meals.  And best of all, there is a lot of pink in the game’s visuals which is another reason gays will feel right at home with this game.

Another game that the gay community will love in Animal Crossing: City Folk.  This game is a gay person’s dream come.  You can be a fashion designer without worrying about people calling you a derogatory names.  Just the opposite.  The animals condone you to make the best fashion around.  Want to be an interior decorator and design wallpaper and decorate the inside of your home?  This game has it.  And not only that, the better you design the interior of your house, the better scores you will get.  Another thing that gay people will love is the ability to invite their friends into the town they created, and have a voice chat session using Wii Speak technology to talk about all the cute guys at the mall, and talk about the tightness of the new pair of leather pants that they bought.

If these games do not suit you, there is one game called Cho Aniki that will make the blood of any homosexual man get horny.  This game is called Cho Aniki for the Turbo Graphix 16 system.  You can buy it on the Wii’s Virtual Console.  I could describe what the game is about, but why should I when it only needs one picture to persuade the gay community to buy a Wii for this game.

If you need any more reason that the Wii is the most gay friendly system, Nintendo is one of the few companies to make a gay character.  His name is Tingle and he likes to skip and hop around in a tight green costume and giggle when young boys ask him for advice about their quests and adventures.

When Nintendo claimed that the Wii would appeal to a broad audience of consumers, they were not kidding around.  While the Nintendo Wii plays a favorite among little kids and grandmas, it has much love from the gay community.  Gay people like to stay fit and games like Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort, and WiiFit allow them to keep in shape so they can look sexy in hopes of scoring with a handsome hunk.  Now while gay people like to stay in shape, they are not exactly the most masculine and muscular people in the world.  Most gay people wouldn’t choose an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 because it is too heavy for them to carry around.  A gay person’s body is not built to carry around large, heavy consoles.  The Wii is small, light, white, and sleek.  Now, even though gay people might not like the Wii’s design and color as much as the GameCube’s purple purse design, it still looks nice to place in a home without worrying about it looking bad.

We did multiple polls on message boards such as Gamespot, 1UP, and IGN, asking if they were straight, gay, or bisexual.  The results were astounding.  The poll results showed that there were more gay owners who own the Wii more than any other console.  After completely the study, we asked them why they like the Wii over the 360/Playstation 3.  They told us they didn’t like how 360/PS3 games had so many dark games with brown/black/grey color palettes.  Usually straight men like games with darker colors because it makes them feel more manly and adult.  While we noticed that gay people tend to enjoy brighter color palettes such as red, yellow, orange, etc in games such as Super Mario Galaxy.  I once knew someone who was gay and he always talked about the colors and art styles of videogames.  The more stylish and artistic, the more gay people are more willing to play that game.  While another friend of mine who was straight, cared more if the visuals were realistic and looked like real life.  Straight people like graphics to look more like real life and less cartoonish.  Straight tend to enjoy games involving killing people or sports, while gay people tend to enjoy games about running around in a colorful fantasy world full of talking animals, colorful creatures, and magic.  Now, this doesn’t mean all people who enjoy games like that gay.  But I believe most of them are.

Gay people love to make great gourmet food and the Wii allows them to do that in a videogame such as Cooking Mama.  Cooking Mama is a great game for homosexuals because it allows you to be a great chef and create excellent meals.  And best of all, there is a lot of pink in the game’s visuals which is another reason gays will feel right at home with this game.

Another game that the gay community will love in Animal Crossing: City Folk.  This game is a gay person’s dream come.  You can be a fashion designer without worrying about people calling you a derogatory names.  Just the opposite.  The animals condone you to make the best fashion around.  Want to be an interior decorator and design wallpaper and decorate the inside of your home?  This game has it.  And not only that, the better you design the interior of your house, the better scores you will get.  Another thing that gay people will love is the ability to invite their friends into the town they created, and have a voice chat session using Wii Speak technology to talk about all the cute guys at the mall, and talk about the tightness of the new pair of leather pants that they bought.

If these games do not suit you, there is one game called Cho Aniki that will make the blood of any homosexual man get horny.  This game is called Cho Aniki for the Turbo Graphix 16 system.  You can buy it on the Wii’s Virtual Console.  I could describe what the game is about, but why should I when it only needs one picture to persuade the gay community to buy a Wii for this game.

If you need any more reason that the Wii is the most gay friendly system, Nintendo is one of the few companies to make a gay character.  His name is Tingle and he likes to skip and hop around in a tight green costume and giggle when young boys ask him for advice about their quests and adventures.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on Presidents Obama and Bush. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Presidents array themselves along a continuum with two extremes: either they are crusaders for their cause or merely defenders of the faith. Either they attempt to transform the landscape of America politics, or they attempt to modify it in incremental steps. To cite the titles of the autobiographies of the current and last presidents: either presidents declare the “audacity of hope” or they affirm a “charge to keep.” If President Obama is the liberal crusader, President George Bush was the conservative defender.

The strategies of presidential leadership differ for the crusader and the defender, but President Obama appears to be misreading the nature of his mandate. Conciliation works for the defender; it can be ruinous to the would-be crusader.

The crusader must have his base with him, all fired up and ready to go. For to go to places unseen, the crusader must have the visionaries, even the crazy ones, on his side. The defender, conversely, must pay homage to partisans on the other side of the aisle because incremental change requires assistance from people, including political rivals, invested in the status quo. Moderate politics require moderate friends.

The irony is that President George Bush, a self-proclaimed defender - spent too much time pandering to his right-wing base, and Barack Obama - a self-proclaimed crusader, is spending a lot of time appeasing his political rivals. Their political strategies were out of sync, and perhaps even inconsistent with their political goals.

Take the issue of gay rights for President Obama. The President is trying so hard to prove to his socially conservative political rivals that he is no liberal wacko that he has reversed his previous support for a full repeal of The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). What he may not have realized is that it may be politically efficacious for a defender to ignore his base, but the costs to the crusader for alienating his base are far graver. Bipartisanship is not symmetrically rewarding in all leadership contexts.

Consider the example of President Bill Clinton, a “third-way” Democrat. He ended welfare as we knew it, and on affirmative action he said “mend it, don’t end it.” Much to Labor’s chagrin, he even passed NAFTA. Bill Clinton was no crusader. And if the Democratic base wanted a deal-making, favor-swapping politico, they would have nominated a second Clinton last year.
The crusader rides on a cloud of ideological purity. Without the zealotry and idolatry of the base, the crusader is nothing; his magic extinguished. And this is happening right now to Barack Obama.

The people who gave the man his luster are also uniquely enpowered to take it away. (It is a mistake to think that Sean Hannity or Michael Steele have this power.) Obama campaigned on changing the world, and his base can and will crush him for failing to deliver on his audacity. The Justice Department’s clumsy defense of DOMA via the case law recourse of incest and pedophilia may be a small matter in the administration’s scheme of things, but it is a big and repugnant deal to the base - the people who matter for a crusading president.

This is a pattern in the Obama administration: for the promise to pull troops out of Iraq there was the concomitant promise of more in Afghanistan, for the release of the OLC “torture memos,” operatives of harsh interrogation techniques were also offered immunity, in return for the administration’s defense of DOMA, Obama promised to extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. This is incremental, transactional, and defensive leadership. Defenders balance; but crusaders are mandated to press on. Incremental leadership works for presidents mandated to keep a charge, but not for one who flaunted his audacity. There are distinct and higher expectations for a crusader-to-be; and if President Obama is to live up to his hype, then bear the crusader’s cross he must.

Library Journal has a great roundup of graphic novels where either the superhero is gay or the novels feature leading LGBT characters or themes.  Though I don’t read a lot of graphic novels, some of my favorites are on the list:

Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (a great graphic novel from last year)

Pedro and Me by Judd Winick (one of the first graphic novels I ordered in my small library at the time!)

Any of your favorites on the list? 

William N. Eskridge, Jr. and Darren R. Spedale are the authors of Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We’ve Learned from the Evidence. Eskridge is the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at the Yale Law School. Spedale spent two years on a Fulbright Fellowship in Denmark researching Scandinavian same-sex partnerships. He received his J.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Stanford University, and continues his work on same-sex marriage through his pro bono activities.  Here, they comment on the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to uphold Prop 8.

The California Supreme Court’s decision upholding Proposition 8 will be analyzed as a referendum on gay marriage. That would be a mistake. There are much higher stakes in the case. At bottom, it posed the question, What is a Constitution for? The Justices did not address that issue explicitly, but their action spoke volumes.

Prop 8’s ratification by the voters in the 2008 election overrode the Court’s earlier decision invalidating the state’s marriage exclusion of lesbian and gay couples. Lesbian and gay couples challenged Prop 8 as an “unconstitutional constitutional amendment.” Their argument, rejected by the Court, was that Prop 8’s fundamental change in minority rights should have gone through the more deliberative process for constitutional “revisions.” California Attorney General Jerry Brown made a similar argument, that a Constitution cannot be amended to retract “inalienable” rights.

At war in the Prop 8 case were two competing visions of what a Constitution is for. Representing the supporters of Prop 8, former Judge Kenneth Starr argued that a Constitution (or at least the California one) is an expression of the values held by the citizenry. To use Aristotle’s language, the Constitution is the “soul of the city.” Modernizing Aristotle, California provides its citizens with formal opportunities to express their constitutional commitments, through popular initiatives. Once the voters had spoken, the Court itself would have been engaging in unconstitutional usurpation if it had insisted on same-sex marriage.

Attorney General Brown and Shannon Minter (representing the challengers) argued that a Constitution demands more from the democratic process. Inspired by John Locke, their constitutional assumption is that the constitution is a social contract that guarantees basic rights to everyone. The Declaration of Independence called them “inalienable rights,” which means that even the Constitution cannot take them away without risking dissolution of the social contract. Because the Court itself had in 2008 held that marriage was a fundamental, inalienable right for lesbian and gay couples, Brown and Minter maintained that Proposition 8 was a constitutional betrayal.

A superficial reading of the Court’s opinion suggests that Starr prevailed. The Court upheld Prop 8, consistent with Starr’s democratic updating of Aristotle. But the Court rejected Starr’s argument that Prop 8 nullified the estimated 18,000 same-sex marriages performed between June 15 and November 8, 2008. The effect of the Court’s interpretation is to recognize those marriages, consistent with Brown and Minter’s stance in the litigation.

What is one to make of this Solomonic resolution? It may have been politically motivated, splitting the baby so that neither side would feel disrespected, on an issue that evenly divides the citizenry. It may been motivated purely by rule of law considerations. The Court would have had to stretch its precedents to strike down Prop 8, but the well-established canon against retroactive application of new amendments provided a legally hard-to-question rationale for narrowly interpreting Prop 8.

In our view, the Court was operating, at least in part, under a third understanding of what a Constitution is for. Constitutions establish processes for deliberation about important policies and values we should commit ourselves to. A Deliberative Constitution keeps the channels of political discussion open, insists that representative bodies be accountable to the people, and from time to time nudges the political process.

This is probably what the Court was up to. On the one hand, the Justices were persuaded that citizens were not settled in the gay marriage debate. Even as it allowed Prop 8, the Court reminded voters that a future initiative could overturn its rule. The Court was channeling both supporters and opponents of gay marriage back to the persuasive process; judges would not decide the issue for the people.

On the other hand, the Justices gave a nudge to that deliberation by validating the existing gay marriages. This provided an opportunity for gay marriage supporters to falsify stereotypes of gay people as anti-family. (The biggest anti-gay trope, and one exploited during the Prop 8 campaign, is that rights for gay people will corrupt children.) These lesbian and gay married families might also put to the test traditionalist arguments that gay marriage is bad for the community.

Gay marriage will still come to California, through a future initiative rather than a judicial decision. As we argued in our recent book, the new wave of marriage recognition has been coming in state legislatures (Vermont and Maine, with others to come).

The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd

Dade just graduated from high school and his entire life has reached a breaking point.  He has a horrible job at Food World, his parents should be divorced but are hanging on until he leaves for college, and his “boyfriend” Pablo is so far in the closet that he has a girlfriend and won’t acknowledge Dade in public.  Dade drifts through his summer in a haze of marijuana and booze, living in that strange world between high school and college.  On the way he finds both a first true friend, a real boyfriend, and his own voice. 

This book is about making connections and the amazing moments in life that come from making that first leap into fear.  Burd’s writing is a wonderful mix of straight-forward prose and then buttons on the ends of the chapters that rise to another level.  He writes emotional scenes without reveling in the drama but also without denying the emotions that young men feel. 

Dade is a great character who is confused, lost and entirely himself.  He is a person that straight and gay people will relate to easily.  Burd writes beautifully of first love and how tentative it is.  Readers will finally get to read a book where gay teen sexuality is embraced.  Beautifully written, the sexual passages read just like any straight sex scene in a teen novel.  Thank goodness!

Highly recommended, this book offers a gloriously normal but profound look at a gay teen.  Appropriate for ages 16-18.

Dylan Meconis has posted a Flickr set of 12 watercolors from her gallery show at Portland’s Sequential Art Gallery featuring cartoon portraits of lesbian couples: Lady Parts. The show will be a stop on the comics gallery shuttlebus tour at this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Fest.

We previously featured Dylan’s drawings of the Battlestar Galactica cast as Simpsons characters: Battlestar Simpsonica

Notable federal district decision from a week or so ago concerning a student/parent objection to a book that had homoesexual [well, same-sex couple] characters. The court upheld a lower court dismissal of a lawsuit by a family climaing their religious rights were being violated when kids read books involving “positive portrayals of families headed by same-sex parents and same-sex marriage, including the frequently challenged children’s book, King and King.” The court stated that reading the books is not the same as being “indoctrinated” into affirming the choices the book’s characters make, or are evidencing. It’s an interesting challenge and an interesting, and to my mind positive, response with the upshot being “you do not have the right to not be offended”.

The First Circuit rejected the parents’ indoctrination claims. It held that there is no First Amendment free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations. It also held that public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, especially when the school does not require that the student agree with or affirm those ideas, or even participate in discussions about them.

You can read the full opinion here and some backstory on the controversy that sparked these claims here and here. Keep in mind that this book challenge happened in Massachusetts, a state where same sex marriages are legal and where a “1993 state law directed school systems to teach about different kinds of families and the harm of prejudice.”

Today is National Coming Out Day and for all of you coming into your own I thought I would provide some useful resources. Below are some websites and books that should help your journey. Congratulations!

HRC Guide to Coming Out

Lambda Legal (more…)

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D. Michael Lindsay is the author of Faith in The Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite and is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University. Lindsay conducted interviews with a variety of prominent Evangelical Americans — including two former presidents, dozens of political and government leaders, more than 100 top business executives, plus Hollywood moguls, intellectuals, athletes and other powerful figures. His book shows who the real evangelical power brokers are, how they rose to prominence, and what they’re doing with their clout. In the post below he ruminates on the role Evangelicals play in popular culture. Read Lindsay’s other blog posts here.

Evangelicals have been making strides in all kinds of places over the last thirty years. We know about their gains in Washington, but they’ve also been quite active in Hollywood. As I conducted interviews with media moguls and artists—all of whom are evangelical—I was struck by the number of times they compared themselves to another group that has also been on the move, the gay and lesbian movement. (more…)

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Yesterday we posted Part One of an email dialogue between Miranda Hassett and Philip Jenkins, authors respectively of Anglican Communion in Crisis (Princeton University Press) and God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis. Today they continue the conversation.

Email 3 and 4

Philip Jenkins with answers by Miranda Hassett.

Philip Jenkins: On your point about how I am read, I have remarked a few times in the past few years that I am a professor not a prophet! But, conservatives were dead right to take two things from my work, namely the demographic shift, and the tilt towards orthodoxy among many global South churches. If they found that message from me and credited me with that knowledge, well and good, and equally if they found hope and comfort. However, I would say again that the demographic shift is critical news (and definitely good news) for all shades of Christians, not just traditionalists. (more…)

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Stuart P. Green, author of Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime, is the Louis B. Porterie Professor of Law at Louisiana State University. His book navigates the ambiguity of white-collar crimes by examining the underlying moral fabric and illuminating what conduct is worthy of punishment by criminal sanction. Below Green looks at the case of Lord John Brown.

Earlier this month, Lord John Browne, once hailed as the “Sun King of the oil industry,” resigned from his post as CEO of British Petroleum amid allegations that he had lied to a court about his sexual relationship with another man. The 58-year-old Browne, who is viewed as one of the most accomplished business executives of his generation, had brought an invasion-of-privacy suit seeking to enjoin the Mail on Sunday tabloid newspaper from publishing reports about his four-year relationship with 27-year-old Jeff Chevalier. (more…)

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Mark speaks with Heather Jopling, author of Ryan’s Mom is Tall and founder of Nickname Press, about the challenges of bypassing the traditional publishing industry to introduce ideas of inclusion to the next generation.

Participate in the conversation by leaving a comment on this interview, or send an email to [email protected].

Books mentioned: The Not-So-Only Child

Photo: http://nicknamepress.com