Ebay fun

Well I listed some stuff on Ebay, an easy way to make money right? I'm reminded of the episode of Roseanne where Dan says "There is no easy way to make money. If there was your mother would have found it."
I was bombarded by stupid questions.

On this item, a CD, I got "I was about to pay for this item when a box came up to ask if i want to pay an extra $2 for the case.You state that you bought this item new listened to it once, fine so why does it not come with it's case."
I received this question with 4 days left in the auction. You can't pay for an item before it ends. The woman was obviously on drugs.

On this item, I note that I bought the item on Ebay and that when I bought it the doll was listed as mint in box. I say the item is not mint and the previous seller sends me an email saying I'm defaming him and he's going to report my item and have it removed. Well my item wasn't removed, I bought it for $53 and sold it for $97 and I filed a claim against him because it wasn't received in good condition.

On this item I get an email "Do you combine shipping and if so, what is the rate?" Yikes, I have 72 items listed, which ones do you want me to combine?

On this item I get "ciao,sono italiano e sono interessato al billy,non ho paypall,non so come pagare il pezzo,non ho mai fatto pagamenti fuori dall'europa,mi chiedevo se il vaglia postale nostro e' uguale al nostro.fammi sapere,attendo risposta.kiss.e grazie."
Followed by "ok,ma sotto che forma ti devo pagare,vaglia postale?grazie ancora,attendo risposta."
I don't speak that.

On this item I get "Hi again, what is region 2 DVD? Thank You"
If you need to ask it doesn't matter. Sigh.

On this item I get "I just wanted to ask, This Season 2 of the Golden Girls includes all 3 discs from Season 2, correct?"
I said in the listing "This is a STORE DVD with the box and everything I bought from the store."
What part of that doesn't he get?

Bash'd was ok. I wouldn't see it again. The first half was amazing, with the exception of the actors staring at the wall instead of the audience. Full of edgy lyrics and very unique. Then the second half was a mix of Thelma and Louise and a high school production on tolerance. Several plays suffer from bad second halves, Rent for example was heavily rewritten. Previously the song "Take Me or Leave Me" included lyrics about people having crabs and serving them as appetizers.

Tomorrow night I go check out the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. It's cool, I bought a book off Ebay and they guy I bought it from googled me, found this blog and asked if I wanted to come check out the collection. I'm really psyched. It's like all the collecting I've been doing and pouring over these books but free! I can't wait.

Road Trip

I want to coordinate a road trip, visiting 6 ball parks in August. Let's see if I can get a schedule together. I want to go to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

Boston - vs Oakland August 2 & 3, TBD and 1:35 pm Bought
Philadelphia - Aug 5 vs Florida, 7:05 pm Bought
Baltimore - Aug 8 vs Texas, 7:05 pm Bought
Washington - Aug 12 vs New York Mets, 7:10 pm Bought
Pittsburgh - Aug 13 vs Cincinnati, 7:05 pm On sale March 8
Cleveland - Aug 14 vs Baltimore, 7:05 pm Bought

Due to the holiday, I would only need off August 1-15, 10 days. This schedule is also good as I don't have to hand around one place for to long and I get to skip through Pittsburgh in only 1 day!
Leave Toronto August 1, stay in Boston 1st, 2nd and 3rd, drive to Philadelphia, stay the 4th, 5th, 6th, drive to Baltimore, stay the 7th, 8th, 9th, drive to Washington, stay the 10th, 11th and 12th, drive to Pittsburgh, stay the 13th, drive to Cleveland, stay the 14th, 15th and 16th, drive to Toronto and home!

Boston Aug 1, 2 & 3 - http://www.bostonhostel.org/ $37/night, or for the same price you can get a 3 bed dorm at the University beside Fenway Park
Philadelphia 4, 5 & 6 - http://www.bankstreethostel.com/ $22/night, sweet!
Baltimore 7, 8 - http://www.baltimorehostel.org/ $25/night
Washington 9, 10, 11 & 12 - http://www.hiwashingtondc.org/ $28/night
Pittsburgh 13 - Pittsburgh has one hostel, it's closed. :( This Motel 6 is $34/night. Sweet!
Cleveland 14, 15 & 16 - Cleveland has one hostel, a mere 38 miles from downtown. :( This Motel 6 is $44/night. But again, 14 miles away.

Home buying

I've always thought it's important to get an idea and focus on it. I find if you start putting the plan into motion, it develops and you can have your goal. I remember when I was unemployed for a year and then started back making $13 an hour. I just wouldn't accept it so I kept working and trying and here I am.
I booked my vacation to Poland and Germany. I'm going to have to do another blog later with an itinerary. Right now I have like $40 in the bank but if I book and it research and put it together, I know it will happen. I'm thinking I might buy my plane ticket next Friday, I found one for $918. I'm planning on going May 13-23, 2007.
I also started looking into buying a condo. Checking out the mortgage calculator through my bank, I need 5% down. I assumed things I shouldn't, I thought you'd have to have closing costs on top of the 5% down, you don't. I thought 33% maximum of your salary for housing payments was net, it's gross. All things working in my favour.
Working though, if I have:
$7,500 down
I can get a $150,000 condo
for $452.65 every 2 weeks.
That's only $300 more a month than I'm paying now and I'd own the place. Where the Hell do I sign up for that. There's also a small issue that my credit isn't great right now so I ordered my credit report but I figure if I have the down payment they'll be more likely to say yes anyhow.
So what kind of place can I get for $150,000? I don't want to end up in Buttfuck, Idaho like some of my friends.
Checking the Metro Listing Service:
It turns out there's about 10 condos in Toronto for under $150,000. I figure that's ok as I only need 1. The negative is anything in the downtown core has high maintenance fees.
This place is at 30 GLOUCESTER ST. The taxes are included in the maintenance fees which is great. The maintenance fee is $370.84 a month! That would push my monthly housing fee to $1,276.14 which is still less than 40% of my salary so we're all still good, but less so. It would be a 30 minute walk to work and right downtown in the heart of the gay village. If I had $7,500 I'd move in tomorrow.
**** EXTRAS **** Fridge, Stove, A/C Unit In Window, Love Seat, Murphy Bed!! Shelves, Mirrors, All Elfs, All Window Coverings, Everything You See, You Get! Workout Room, Laundry In Building, Library, Party Room! Free Parking And Locker!
Living room : 16 ft ,1 in x 10 ft ,11 in
Kitchen : 8 ft ,9 in x 4 ft ,11 in
Foyer : 7 ft ,4 in x 3 ft ,6 in
My cat and I did some measuring (she mainly ate the tape) and the living room alone is 6 feet longer than I have now.
Finally here's some pictures. Sign me up!



All for $139,900. What's an elf? Why are they included? Can you ask them to leave?

Cum unto Christ!

Satan's Secretary

This Sunday I am going to see Bash'd.

It's a rap musical thing showing at the Factory Theatre with great lines like:
"If we yell FAGGOT and you think it's whack,
well fuck that it's our word and we're taking it back!"
Brilliance.
I haven't been blogging much. Not for lack of ideas, but for the fact that I have been unconscious and sleeping for like 14 hours a day. I miss the sunlight.
Many blogs planned in my head:
- plan my road trip to the baseball parks so I know which tickets to buy in February
- plan my trip to Poland so I can imagine myself not living in the land of darkness (a.k.a. Toronto)
- Stonewall
- Cool books I've got recently
- how much does it cost to buy a condo, and how much do you need upfront

Gay pulp fiction

Gay fiction of yesteryear is something I started collecting recently. I wanted to comment on some of the best titles I've found. I've read a few books and articles on the subject with people talking how they picked up their collections from yard sales and Goodwills but I think those days are dwindling, if not gone. With the advent of the internet people now know they're sitting on a gold mine. Still I picked up most of these for less than $10 which is amazing to me.

I think this is the best one, I paid $88 for it. It is typical of the heterosexualization of the covers of the time, the book opens with the main character's mother getting drunk and hitting on him and the rest of the book is a "gay romp". But they put the woman on the cover. Also the main character is 17, he would be 18 now. The code word "Twilight" in the title is all that suggests the gayness of the plot. The author wrote about 5 books under the name James Colton then switched and wrote a mystery series under the name Joseph Hanson which was immensely popular and still in print today. The James Colton books each had one print run and are scarce as hens teeth. For these reasons, I consider this the primary example of the gay pulp fiction period.

This book is not what I thought it would be. It looks like porn, says "adult reading" and "fully illustrated". I scanned through it and saw nothing sexual whatsoever. Strange. The cover art makes this one an instant classic.

This is another classic cover concept, either a crying woman or a woman looking at a man who's looking at another man. Another example of the heterosexual orthodoxy, the only way a gay story can be appreciated is through a "normal" woman's perspective. The story is of a woman who's married a gay man and decides to steal him back from his male lover. The back cover declares "The man she loved was abnormal!"

This was the first gay pulp fiction novel ever made and I was able to get an original copy for pretty cheap so I'm guessing they printed a lot. It's a man's prison diaries, selling for 35 cents, and the back promises "homosexual slavery - inmates forced to practice abnormal acts with sex deviates who roam the prisons at will". The entry I read was about 5 lines long about how one of the prisoners hid in the laundry cart and had sex with a laundress and got the clap. Another reason I like this is it's in diary style. First persons accounts of gay life are extremely rare for this period.

This novel describes the "startling sexological problems of men who are different" and references the Kinsey study, says this problem "involves one out of every five men in America today!" (emphasis theirs)

The Kinsey study. The bible of sexual study. 3,500 case studies completed in 1948. Every page is gold, let me find a random page:
"As previously noted, the six chief sources of orgasm for the human male are masturbation, nocturnal emissions, heterosexual petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual relations, and intercourse with animals of other species. There are some individuals who derive 100 per cent of their outlet from a single kind of sexual activity. Most persons regularly depend upon two or more sources of outlet; and there are some who may include all six of them in some short period of time."
Totally picked at random! It's gold Jerry, GOLD!

This book I pre-ordered, it comes out in February. It's a reprint of the first medical textbook published on homosexuality. Before the 1960's homosexuals were called inverts, it was believed they possessed a female mind inverted into a male body. This was used interchangeably with pervert. "Are you a pervert?" or "Are you an invert?" meant the same thing.

This book promises the story of a "third sex slave to the Third Reich's brutal lust!" but is pretty tame by today's standards. The third sex was the gay sex, neither male or female. A quote "Guided the heat of his weapon..." it's like a Harlequin novel now. Plus the story doesn't really involve a sex slave, this Jew meets a Nazi who rescues him from the concentration camp and loves him and shows him the joys of S&M. Strange.

This is the third volume in the loon trilogy. I read somewhere that at the end of the 70's, 1 gay man in 5 had read the loon books. It's a latter day Brokeback Mountain with cowboys and Indians.

The back cover:
"The author who must remain anonymous has written an engaging work at self-revelation. The reader is led on a journey through the private hells of the HOMOSEXUAL.
This is Jackie Cassius's story... an actor who was a bi-sexual, he found himself more attracted to men than to women. From the moment of his meeting with the wealthy and influential Orson Doderer Cassius was led down the aisle into the twilight world of desire and dreams. He becomes a MALE BRIDE.
In the arms of the voluptuary Cassius found himself completely helpless... a slave to unlooked for passions."

This book is similar to my favourite of last year. I haven't read it yet but it is the memoir of a man who was arrested in England in the 1950's and imprisoned for being gay. As far as I know only these 2 books exist to detail this time in history. This one is harder to find, I paid $40 for it.

The final book is a version of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. There were several schools of thought on the causes of homosexuality in the 1940's-50's (this book being published in 1947 originally). One was narcissism, that the man loved himself so much he could only be with someone exactly like himself. Another more popular one was that homosexuals wanted to be women. This book describes a man who wears his wifes clothes and is obsessed with their next door neighbour. He urges the wife to have an affair with the neighbour so he can watch. When she says she wants kids it forces him to confront his maleness and he snaps, kills his wife and drives away in a purple angora sweater and sensible skirt.

Best/Worst of 2007

Best movie: High School Musical 2
Most years a film grabs me and makes me take notice, Elephant or Spellbound. This seemed to be the year of mediocrity, and a movie I've seen 10 times with songs to sing along to and a couple of cute boys, one gay.... what more could I ask?

Worst movie: Spider Man 3
I didn't see part 2 and went to see part three because I was lonely one day, it was worse than my wildest nightmares could have imagined. The new Batman has Heath Ledger as the Joker, this crap has the stupid mechanic from Wings. Ghastly.

Best TV Show (scripted): Reaper
Exciting and original, funny and the only reason to turn on a TV.

Worst TV Show (scripted): Dirty Sexy Money
As exciting as watching paint dry. Plots that went nowhere and everyone is too serious.

Best TV Show (reality): TIE X-factor and Project Runway
I love singing and dancing and Simon Cowell. The great thing about these shows is when Simon's nice, like 1 time out of 100, and you know it's genuine. It's like the tough English teacher who helps you get a scholarship.
Runway: take 13 gay men and let them camp and bitch it out fighting over dresses.

Worst TV Show (reality): The Two Coreys
In a strong year for reality, this show was DOA. Annoying people who used to be famous. In one episode the head of PETA comes to dinner with the meat-eating Corey Haim. Will wackiness ensue???? No.

Best Shows Turned to Worst: Ugly Betty, Friday Night Lights, Doctor Who, Brothers and Sisters
I was disappointed in all these shows. I tuned in for the originality and now most seem like one-hit wonders. Doctor Who had a great Christmas show but what about episodes 3-9 of season 3, each week praying for something more interesting to happen? Brothers and Sisters, Ugly Betty and FNL all got bogged down in super serious plots which no one cared about.

Best Book: Against The Law - Peter Wildeblood
The best autobiography I've ever read. Details his arrest and one year prison term for being homosexual in England in 1955. Never playing for sympathy, this book quietly draws the picture and lets the reader make up his own mind. Brilliant.

Worst Book: Shopaholic and Baby - Sophie Kinsella
How to take a franchise too far. These books started out light and fun in a Bridget Jones kind of way. But the reason we loved Bridget was she was the anti-hero, when she drank wine from the bottle and sang "All By Myself" we sung with her. When Beckie has a crisis because she can't get into the celebrity obstetrician, we're left thinking "Who Cares?"

Trend of the Year: Buying old gay books, I hope to do a blog post with some of my findings soon.

Person of the Year: Joe Strutt.
It amazes me how the nicest person I know still wants to keep in contact with me. He always makes time and checks in, I really appreciate it.

Worst person of the Year: Guindon.
Satan's secretary. Makes my skin crawl.

Best Political Party: Conservatives
For being the only party with ethics. The only party with a strong leader. The only party that believes in equality. To me the essence of the Conservative Party is that if you work and try to do right, right will be done to you. Everything should be above board. The government should not entangle itself in the affairs of the public.

Worst Political Party: Liberals
I don't understand what anyone sees in them. They are the definition of wishy-washy and have more corrupt members in their ranks than we will ever know. They say they won't raise taxes and then bring in the largest tax increase in history because it was "necessary". I would like to encourage anyone reading this, if you have had better health care in the last 12 months from your extra $900 annual tax let me know and I will eat my hat. Or yours. Whichever is smaller.

Best Memory of the Year: Seeing Hairspray on Broadway in New York City with Lance Bass and meeting him afterward.

Worst Memory of the Year: Tornado