Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence: charity & activism

San Francisco and Halloween made me go back and dig up this recent profile of the wonderful Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence:

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence started in 1979 as one of the first charities supporting San Francisco’s gay community and has since spread to more than 600 sisters in eight countries.

Mixing street theater, drag-queen elegance and community fundraising, the men of the Sisterhood support AIDS organizations, help combat hate crimes and, as they put it, “promote universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt.”

“We are part of the modern gay rights movement,” said Sister Kitty Catalyst of San Francisco. “We are not ashamed of our differences, we are proud of them.”

Calling themselves 21st century nuns, the sisters have raised more than $1 million in San Francisco alone and have benefited such groups as the Breast Cancer Network, Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic and the Gay Games. The Sisters bring meals to the infirm and fund alternative proms for queer youth.

Now that’s some old-time gay culture, whether they live in the Castro or not.

RELATED: A recent stunt had Catholics calling the archbishop a “Judas priest” and, predictably, riled up Bill O’Reilly.

End of gay culture again

Uh oh, I expect Andrew Sullivan will trot out his end of gay culture argument again when he sees this:

This Halloween, the Glindas, gladiators and harem boys of the Castro - along with untold numbers who plan to dress up as Senator Larry E. Craig, this year’s camp celebrity - will be celebrating behind closed doors. The city’s most popular Halloween party, in America’s largest gay neighborhood, is canceled. [...]

For many in the Castro District, the cancellation is a blow that strikes at the heart of neighborhood identity, and it has brought soul-searching that goes beyond concerns about crime.

These are wrenching times for San Francisco’s historic gay village, with population shifts, booming development, and a waning sense of belonging that is also being felt in gay enclaves across the nation, from Key West, Fla., to West Hollywood, as they struggle to maintain cultural relevance in the face of gentrification.

My argument is not that these neighborhoods will stay or come back or are by any means relevant or necessary. Rather, it’s that a gay culture will continue to exist.

The Castro remains a top tourist destination for gay and lesbian visitors. But Joe D’Alessandro, president and C.E.O. of the San Francisco Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, and a gay parent who lives in the Castro, predicted that eventually the neighborhood would go the way of North Beach, “still a historic Italian neighborhood though Italians don’t necessarily live there anymore.”

I began my career working on the film Before Stonewall. The point of it was that there was a gay culture before. There was Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis and Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. There will be an after too.

Happy Halloween

Download and print out the costume then join the parade…

- Thanks Jason!

Professional malware Mac attack

Wired’s Threat Level:

Hackers are reportedly sticking virtual razor blades into Apple computers this Halloween, as a Mac security vendor reports Wednesday that a Mac-focussed Trojan is reportedly loose on the internet costumed as an innocent video decoding file.

Mac OS X users visiting malicious porn sites are told to download a special codec that will let Apple’s Quicktime player to play the porn flicks, but instead of adult treats, users get a malicious trick, according to anti-virus vendor Intego.

The OS X Trojan, which infects a computer after a user chooses to download a proprietary codec, hijacks the infected computer’s DNS settings. Internet-connected applications use DNS settings to figure out how to translate URLs, such as Wired.com, into the physical address of a server, according to Intego’s alert. By hijacking the DNS, the Trojan is able to redirect visits to sites such as banks, eBay and PayPal to fake websites that attempt to harvest user’s logins and passwords to commit financial fraud.

Gadi Evron says:

I can sum it up in one sentence: OS X is the new Windows 98.

The same gang infects Windows machines as well, just that now they also target macs.[...]

This means one thing: Apple’s day has finally come and Apple users are going to get hit hard. All those unpatched vulnerabilities from years past are going to bite them in the behind.

Sunbelt Software’s Alex Eckelberry has screenshots.

Attribution corrected. Thanks, Alex!

Bush: The downside of dynasty

For all the recent talk of “Bush-Clinton fatigue” - The AP’s Nancy Benac says, “The dominance of the two families in U.S. presidential politics is unprecedented.” - Hendrik Hertzberg takes us on a Dynastic Voyage through America’s past that suggest it’s just not so.

But, he concludes, for Hillary there still may be a downside:

Senator Clinton is different, obviously. She is indisputably a wife-of, but it was she, not he, whom Life selected as an icon of their generation when she graduated from college. It was she, not he, who, as a young lawyer, got the coveted job with the House Watergate investigation. She would have gone far, maybe even this far, without him. However much she benefits from the dynasty factor, though, the Economist is right: there’s a downside. The downside’s name is Bush. If, as the voters in 2000 wished, Al Gore, son of Senator Albert Gore, Sr., had been granted the White House, things might be a bit easier-not just for Hillary Clinton but also for her main Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama. George W. Bush has been as poor an advertisement for “inexperience” as for dynasticism. It’s not fair, of course. Bush’s failure to learn much of anything for the past six years suggests a deficit of character, not of experience; his unwillingness to employ his father’s skills and advice on behalf of the nation shows a disrespectful disregard for a dynast’s biggest advantage. He has given both freshness and family a bad name.

Via Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith at Veracifier, where she mourns that there were no Smiths among the American dynasties, “my parents did a lousy job of marrying into the six ruling families that dominate American politics… In fact, the only legitimate dynastic claims my family could hedge would be at the Piggly-Wiggly...”

Sonny’s mixed message on water

Yesterday Gov. Sonny Perdue called the 10% water cutback he ordered was largely symbolic.

What gives?

As many suspected:

Throughout this water crisis, every state official of high standing - not just Perdue, but House Speaker Glenn Richardson and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle as well - has been asked whether overdevelopment is part of the problem.

In each case, the official has said no. Metro Atlanta’s unbounded growth has little or no relationship to the availability of water.

But if you admit that conservation has an impact on water use, then it follows that consumption is an issue that’s more than symbolic. And putting a lid on development would be a next step.

So if you want to keep that growth engine churning, you can’t permit yourself to view conservation as anything more than necessary morale boosting.

UPDATE: Looks like Atlanta businesses are more clued in to the reality than Sonny.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Good news coming for Georgia.

LATER STILL: Not so much.

Do not track list

A terrific idea:

Most consumers are familiar with do-not-call lists, which are meant to keep telemarketers from phoning them. Soon people will be able to sign up for do-not-track lists, which will help shield their Web surfing habits from the prying eyes of marketers.

Such lists will not reduce the number of ads that people see online, but they will prevent advertisers from using their online meanderings to deliver specific ad pitches to them.

Today the AOL division of Time Warner will announce a service of this type, which will be up and running by the end of the year. Other programs are likely to be articulated soon, as online advertisers prepare for a two-day forum on privacy to be held by the Federal Trade Commission.

AOL says it is setting up a new Web site that will link consumers directly to opt-out lists run by the largest advertising networks. The site’s technology will ensure that people’s preferences are not erased later.

I won’t be opting out; I want the benefits of being tracked. But to have them we need to build an apparatus that ensures our privacy and appropriately safeguards and regulates and access to information and limits how it can be used. This is at least a start in that direction:

AOL executives say they are happy to give people a way to keep their Internet habits private, even though that would undercut AOL’s own behavioral targeting efforts. In July AOL acquired a behavioral ad network company, Tacoda, that has been promoting opt-out options to users for a year.

“We all have to build toward a future where we are delivering ads people want and not just ads we want people to see,” said Dave Morgan, the founder of Tacoda who now works at AOL. “The only way to do that is to listen to consumers.”

LATER: Sweating Through Fog has fun with last year’s AOL search breach.

More straights arrested for lewd conduct at rest stops

I’m really getting sick of this. It’s not the out proud gay people that you find acting out in places like this. CBS:

Almost two dozen men were arrested as a result of a gay sex sting operation in an unsuspecting location off Interstate 684 in Bedford.

Police say the suspects in the operation were getting more than just rest at the highway rest area where the sting took place.

Among them a priest and the president of the rotary club. But here’s the clincher:

Of the twenty men arrested, all were married except for the priest. They’ve been charged with crimes ranging from loitering and public lewdness to trespassing. All are scheduled to be in court on Thursday.

Then there’s the kinky Republican Washington state GOP legislator who picked up a hustler in a sex shop then claimed he was being blackmailed.

The details are so sordid I was initially reluctant to link to it.

SEE ALSO: Let’s get the straights out of those tea room stalls!