i guess we should do things differently.

I guess I will have to take Cynthia with me when I travel...you know, just to "carry" things.

Well like you, I greet the news with a big yawn. So what's new in the anti gay ultra conservative christian fundamentalist community? Same old scandal new rent boy. Hypocrisy justs turns my stomach.

Rufus

Yes!
 

It made The Washington Post.

I thought maybe news agencies weren't going to run the story.

Oh goodie!

Though some conservatives may consider the Post an alternative paper,
it's clear they've done their fact checking.

June;

You're absolutely correct, this kind of stuff DOES get more attention than those of us who go about our daily lives, working, paying taxes and being good human beings. I would submit to you, dear friend, that in fact this is a GOOD thing. Go back to my invocation of the journalism school "dog bites man isn't news, but man bites dog is news". I would rather live in a world where my getting up and going to work and then going to class and then dragging my tired butch ass home is a case of the dog biting than man, than of the man biting the dog. I submit that, in case, the reason why you don't hear much about this queer people who go about living their ordinary lives is *because* they are ordinary lives.

My sister getting up and going to work everyday is about as newsworthy as the fact that the Sun rose in the East this morning. Your getting up and going to work everyday is as newsworthy as my sister doing so. It would be a sad sign indeed if, in fact, we got noticed for doing ordinary things because it would mean one of two things: either people don't expect us to have ordinary lives, in which case our doing so becomes news or we, as a group, really *don't* have ordinary, mundane lives. Given the choice, which would you want--to be treated like any other citizen, a curiosity or the exception to the rule?

Cheers
Aj

NPR has also picked up the story. Now, I'm sure that they'll close ranks, he'll continue to deny for a week, then he will be quietly shuffled off the stage when it's clear that all his denials aren't working.

You'd think that almost 40 years after Watergate these jokers would realize that's it NEVER the crime that causes you the most trouble, it's the coverup.

Aj

London Times Online
 

Baptist minister 'took ten-day holiday with male prostitute'

A Baptist minister and leading anti-gay activist faced the ruination of his career yesterday after being photographed returning from a European holiday with a male prostitute.

George Rekers, who sits on the board of a national organisation dedicated to changing the sexuality of gay men and lesbians, hired a companion from a website called Rentboy.com that offers clients a wide range of choices, from “rentboy” and “sugar daddy” to “masseur”.

Dr Rekers said he took the prostitute on the ten-day trip last month to London and Madrid as a travel assistant after a stint in hospital. “I had surgery,” he said when approached this week by the Miami New Times. “I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” Photographs of the pair emerging from Miami international airport last month show the older man pushing their suitcases on a trolley.

Dr Rekers’s companion has been identified as a 20-year-old Puerto Rican whose entry on the Rentboy.com website gives his name as “Geo”. The site says that he is “sensual”, “wild” and “up for anything”. It also describes him as “versatile”, with a “nice ass”.

Contacted this week by reporters in Miami, he said he was surprised by Dr Rekers’s claim to have realised he was a prostitute only halfway through their holiday.

Geo’s profile on Rentboy.com is a bewildering mix of the banal and the specific. “I’m a college guy, masculine, educated, really easy going,” he says. “Great to get along with, can hold a conversation.” He lists stripping and go-go dancing among his talents. “I will do anything you say as long as you ask,” he promises.

Dr Rekers, who co-founded America’s most powerful Christian lobbying group, has testified as an expert in favour of bans on gay adoption in Florida and Arkansas. He has also written numerous books on homosexuality as a curable condition, including Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know about Homosexuality.

Gay rights advocates called yesterday for him to step down from the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (Narth), for which he lectures across the world. He is also closely linked with the Washington-based Family Research Council, which he founded with Dr James Dobson in 1983.

In an e-mailed response to questions about the European trip, he said: “My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them.”

Dr Rekers also told a blogger who reached him via Facebook: “If you talk with my travel assistant . . . you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.”

In 2006 Ted Haggard resigned as a leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after a male prostitute claimed to have had sex with him for three years.

Ray Ashburn, a California state senator with a long record of opposing gay rights, was arrested and charged with drunk-driving this year while leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento. In 1988 Jimmy Swaggart, one of America’s most successful televangelists, was found to have had regular paid sex with prostitutes.

Do as I say ...

• The televangelist Pat Robertson caused outrage when he said that the Haiti earthquake was caused by “a pact to the Devil” sworn by Haitians when they became independent of French rule

• Matt Baker, a Texan minister, was convicted of faking his wife’s suicide in 2009 so that he could have a relationship with a member of his church

• Kent Hovind, a creationist minister with his own dinosaur theme park in Florida, was sentenced to ten years in jail for falsely declaring bankruptcy and threatening investigators in 2006 Hovind paid employees in cash, claiming that they were all workers of God and therefore exempt from taxes

• The TV minister Jim Bakker shocked viewers of his television series when it emerged that he had had an affair with a secretary, paying her off with church funds. He was jailed in 1989 for fraud after paying himself and his wife, Tammy Faye, below, millions of dollars in church funds and concocting a timeshare scam at his theme park in South Carolina

Sources: ABC; AP; BBC; Time; Times archives

not sure if this was already posted, but it's the ad with pic.

(he sure is cute, but doesn't look like he could carry that much luggage...)

http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/201...edium=facebook

Rekers handling his OWN luggage/and his umm..."travel assistant"
 

i don't claim this guy with any pride -- or bother to claim him at all since he denies he's gay.

But i don't CARE if he makes us look bad. i'd rather be associated with someone who -- honestly -- makes use of rentboy.com than the soccer moms that organizations like the Lesbian and Gay Task Force put forward to represent us.

i am FINE with our looking slutty. i don't pander to the prejudices of people already inclined to dislike me.

So that Florida state senator was caught looking at porn during an abortion debate, and his excuse is he was bored. lol. Ironies on top of ironies. But i don't think anyone is rushing to condemn white men for being porn addicts or whatever.

The fact is i do not live my life worrying about what middle American might think. i know they don't have my best interest at heart.

It always interests me from a public relations standpoint (since that's my profession) the lengths that the conservatives and homophobes go to lie their way to "the truth." First rule in political PR, which is my specialty, is when you are in a situation like this, tell the truth. Spin never works for sexual orientation, marital infidelity (witness John Edwards) or money issues. The truth works great. It's sad to me that they have to lie. Think of the hate we could erase if they would just do the right thing -- the Christian thing -- and tell the truth. If you haven't watched the documentary "Outrage," I recommend it.

i can totally see june's point but i *don't* see this false-individual as 'one of us', people i know don't build their lives around hatred and bullshit and get *caught* hiring escorts.

what i mean is, i see him as a *fraud* not someone who can't/wouldn't just 'be gay' i think of him as along the lines of someone that works with animals and abuses them on the side--or any kind of person living a total life of hypocrisy, for me, that means that i don't think he's now 'gay' i think at some point he began to fetishize what for him must be a 'life style' and spent his life working out his shit in/on the public (vs private, constructive therapy), which make his *secret* trysts all that more enjoyable, for him--nevermind the total destruction he causes in real, actual gay peoples' lives.

again, i get what you mean when you say people see this and think x = GAY! how bizarre their behavior! ...i only hope people separate those individuals from the people like you or *most* of us who can go an entire life time without renting someone for sex or belonging to an organization that tries to subvert our inner-most and all-consuming 'desire'.

the thing with these guys, i think demonizing their own desire plays a crucial role in their fucking, and i just think that i didn't sign up to be in their dynamic, it lacks consent (yet they play it out in public!) which goes light years beyond just being false, wrong and a big ol' lie.

-i hope this makes sense, i'm in a bit of a rush and will gladly respond later to anything i've been unclear on, which includes context and sentence fragments!! :)

I agree with you. It boggles my mind how much this guy, and others like him, must hate themselves to live and act like they do. I don't feel scorn as much as I feel sorry for him, in a way, you know? Maybe that's too generous or humanist of me. But still.

His Facebook Page on Teen Sex!
 

i have never paid for sex, but if it's an us vs them thing, i am on the side of those who have paid for it vs those who judge others for having done it.

i sends chills up me to be considered one of "us" if "us" means those who have proudly never paid for sex. Sure prostitution everywhere has its ills. But i am so not going to judge either people who have used the services of sex workers or sex workers themselves.

And Un CUt..! I mean, that kind of seals the deal, doncha think ?

Another quick response. Witch hunts against gay men have used prostitution laws as tools. We all know that.

One of the best essays i have read about being femme was by a sex worker who felt NO solidarity with us until she read an article by Joan Nestle about her straight slutty mom.

i so stand with sex workers if there is some line drawn in the sand between acceptable-to-straight-folks gay people and everyone else.

Didn't HIV activism teach us anything??

he's not sleeping with the hookers, he orders them up and then tries to save their souls, one by one..... ;)

I certainly dont see this person as "one of us"

Im thinking about the conservative lunatics I went to high school with, and are on my facebook.

What I have learned from them is this. They will not see that there is a difference between this person and us.

They see this person as an example of why we dont deserve the things we are fighting for. Because when creatins like this make the news, that is all my conservative aquaintances see.