outies

El Paso, Texas, around 1983. I had recently come out of the closet, and every weekend I would drive my little Mazda pickup truck down to that southwestern metropolis to go to the gay bars.

It was one hundred and twenty miles away from my hometown, but it was the closest place to my home that had such establishments. Plus, at that time, the legal drinking age in Texas was nineteen, whereas in New Mexico, it was twenty one. At eighteen, I could definitely pass, and never got carded when visiting The Old Plantation or The San Antonio Mining Company, El Paso's two most popular gay bars.

The two bars were relatively close to one another, although it was somewhat risky to walk from one to the other. The area was an industrial one, and could definitely be considered on the wrong side of the tracks. In fact, you had to walk over old railroad tracks before going into the Mining Co. Several gay bashings had been reported in recent months, but everyone always traveled in groups of at least three, so we felt safe.

That feeling of safety was shattered when I, my friend Bart, his lover Bobby, and our friend Sam were making our usual drunken stumble from the Mining Co (a dive bar) to the Plantation (a dance club).

The alleyway was dark, and the sounds of our footsteps echoed quite a bit, so it was to our great surprise that we found ourselves confronted by several beefy rednecks who announced themselves by chucking a couple of beer bottles at us, shouting, "Hey, faggots!".

Time slowed to a crawl. Instinctively, Bart and I moved to the front of the group, I because I'm pretty beefy myself, Bart because he was a veritable god of chiseled muscle. Bobby was small; Sam was tall and willowy. Bart and I figured we'd be better at bearing the brunt of what we were afraid was coming than the other two boys.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sam fiddling with his handbag, a small glittery thing, which didn't seem to serve much purpose other than to hold a pack of cigarettes, the odd joint or other recreational drug, and whatever lip gloss Sam had decided to wear that evening. I couldn't possibly fathom what Sam was doing with that handbag at that particular moment.

Then I heard a gunshot.

From behind me.

It was impossibly loud. I had never heard a gun fired at such close range other than the .22's I'd fired at summer camp, and the sound was huge and amplified in that dusty Texas alleyway. My ears seemed to close themselves against the sound, as if to deny it and the violence it could represent in a situation already fraught with the most fearsome danger a young queer could face.

Incredulous, and somewhat against my will (I didn't want to take my eyes off our potential assailants) I turned my head slightly, and there stood Sam. Holding a rather large pistol. And smiling at the good ol' boys confronting us.

In his soft Texas drawl, Sam spoke, without a quiver in his voice, or hint of nervousness in his stance:

"Don't y'all boys mean to say, 'Hey, armed faggots?'"

Across the alley, four pairs of hands immediately shot into the air. Sam made a little twitching movement with his pistol, telling them to just get the fuck out of our sight. Our cowed assailants broke and ran.

The entire incident couldn't have taken more than a minute, but my entire perception of Sam swung from funny queen to hero in that small frame of time.

Had the incident happened today, it probably would have been far more earth-shattering, but in our youth we just laughed it off, and headed to the Plantation almost as if nothing had happened.

Oh, and by the way ... Sam never had to pay for a drink again.

A Chicago neighborhood that is part of Lakeview, and contains many gay bars and clubs, as well as stores such as Gay Mart and other gay souvenir and accessory stores. Located on Halsted Street between Belmont and Addison, approximately. It was seedy in the 70s and 80s; today it's far more hip. It's a good place to go if you're a woman and don't want to be hit on by men. It's very gay male-centric and doesn't have so much for the lesbians. The street corners are marked by sculptures that look like very phallic rainbows.

A combination of the words gay and neighborhood, this term has the straightforward meaning of ¨gay neighborhood¨.

With that said, it is worth pointing out that neighborhoods themselves are not gay; only living beings (in this case, people) can wear the gay label. Gay neighborhoods tend to have a very high percentage of self-identified homosexuals, but certainly, gay people do not comprise the total population. Furthermore, there are usually not very firm boundaries delineating which areas are the ¨gay¨ ones, and which are not.

Of course, with some possible rare exceptions, gayborhoods are found only in cities, since gay culture is, for the most part, centered around urban life. Gay men and women are often referred to as ¨urban pioneers¨, since gay neighborhoods are often born where real estate is cheap, and violent crime is high. But soon after a few gay-themed businesses open their doors in a ¨bad¨ neighborhood, (e.g., gay bookstores, gay clubs, etc.), or after a handful of gay people move into a concentrated area, a larger influx of gay persons with a higher financial standard of living occurs.

In short order, the neighborhood´s violent crime rate drops, and real estate prices rise dramatically. Non-gay persons who wish an urban dwelling will move in at this point, and the prices will go up even higher, so much so that eventually gay people, being a statistical minority, won´t be able to afford apartments and homes in such disproportionate numbers as before.

The term gentrification is sometimes used to describe this process, but without any necessary involvement of gay people. That term, though, has some offensive implications; specifically that less affluent residents were somehow less deserving of the real estate in the area, or that every one of those poorer residents was responsible for the high crime rate. These, of course, are not true; money and affluence do not equal personal worth or moral superiority. However, there is a link between poverty and violent crime rates; but in any case, the criminal element remains always a small percentage of the population, with the majority being law-abiding citizens.

Confessions of an Anarchist

A TRUE STORY: friday night in a bar in a small town I used to call my home

toronto maple leafs cap at the bar: "Are you a fucking faggot?"

first thought: self defense
I want to tell him about my girlfriend. About all the times growing up that I laughed at jokes about fags and queers and other perverts. Tell him about going to the high school prom, getting drunk and getting laid, just like i was supposed to. Tell him about every girl i've fucked.

second thought: education
I want to sit him down and explain to him about hate. About how ignorance and the fear of everything different is tearing the world apart at the seams. try to explain just once that being a white christian heterosexual male does not make hatred all right. i want to repeat all the things that my third grade teacher and those like him have tried to tell us about how every person is equal and deserves to be treated with respect.

third thought: anger
fuck him. i want to grab him by the throat and tell him all about how cum tastes a little salty, but not that bad at all. tell him about the way a cock that's not your own feels in your hand. warm. firm. reassuring. fuck him.

You see the problem is that about a second and a half has passed, and I haven't said anything yet. He can't see me think. What he can see is my purple hair. He can see the chains, and sure enough he has noticed the eyeshadow. I'm pretty sure that sealed the deal. But, I've got to say something. might as well go with trusty thought number three. I wink at him, "Why are you?"

I'm not exactly sure what happened next, but I remember that it involved yelling and it involved me laughing far more loudly than the situation warranted. Soon enough there were some bouncers and some dragging into the parking lot.

Suddenly there I am with my fists swinging and my face bleeding. My stomach sinks as it always does and then the adrenaline kicks in full force and I remember every one of the dozens of other fights I've been in over the years in this little hockey town. Remembering the old fights doesn't help you any when you have to deal with the fight right NOW. There are a lot more of them than there are of me.

Friends coming to my side. More than i could possible have expected from them. It's not their fight, and they aren't even really my friends, but my sister's.

When I was thirteen, I sat behind a Dungeon Master's screen and somehow managed to evoke in the minds of my friends an image, a scene. A battleground where the heroes, outnumbered ten to four valiantly fought and won the day, exchanging clever banter all the while.

That's not how it goes here. No clever banter and in the end twenty fists always win over eight. And with those twenty fists come twenty Nike-clad feet that aren't at all ashamed to kick you in the face as soon as you hit the ground. Really it's just a blur of red and black. I remember knocking one attacker to the ground with my forearm. I remember jumping a guy from behind who was repeatedly kicking my sister's boyfriend, Dave, in the stomach. I think Dave was spitting up blood. I remember tightening my arm around his neck until he was limp, unconscious, on the pavement. I vaguely remember getting kicked in the side of the head. What I remember very clearly though is being dragged to my feet by a group of four corn-fed white boys in leafs jerseys and denim jackets. i remember being surrounded and told to "Get against the fucking wall!". I remember looking desperately around for a way out, for a friend. "Can you hear me? Get against the fucking wall, faggot!". Visions of execution running over and over in my head.

Tripped from behind. I fall on my back and my head hits the pavement. A leafs jersey with a denim jacket straddles me in a way that would be sexual if he wasn't holding my head against the ground and drawing back his giant meaty right fist. My head explodes in a bloom of impossibly bright white sparks. I stare death in the eyes as I lose consciousness.

I can hear screaming voices. girls. two of them. I know those voices. I've got it now. Kristin, my sister. Alice, my girlfriend. i can't quite make out the words though. there is a much more pressing voice much closer, and it's saying my name. "Franko. Franko. Franko. Can you hear me Franko." I don't know if i managed to say something or if i just shook my head and blinked my eyes in a particularily convincing manner, but the voice continued, "Franko, get the fuck out of here, before they fucking kill you. Just get out of here."

I'm dragged to my feet once again and given a preliminary shove. The world slowly comes back into focus, soft focus mind you, and i find my feet. I risk a glance over my shoulder and there are still bodies surging back and forth. That's a brawl, I've seen those before and somewhere in there someone responsible for dragging me out is getting their head kicked in. But i don't go back. I know that I'm holding onto consciousness only by luck right now. I go forward. Towards the yellow light. I'm terrified that one of the leafs jerseys has seen me and is following me, my stagger becomes a crooked run.

Suddenly I'm through the glass door and safe at last. In Tim Hortons, under the watchful eye of the soup menu, where I cannot come to harm. I have found my sanctuary in this corporate hell-hole where they sell coffee hand-picked in colombia by better men than me. Men who work 12 hour days for wages that just barely allow them to convince themselves that they aren't slaves. Just like the poor pregnant girl behind the counter. About five months in it looks like, bulge tucked neatly under the pinstripe shirt. Only 23 I'd guess, but already the type where you would say "She must have been pretty once."

I can't read her expression. Is it shock or fear or what? But I must look a mess, and let's not forget I'm already the freak here. "Call the fucking cops! Call the cops, they're going to kill my friends!"

I've hated cops before. And soon enough I'll hate them again. Tidy little fascists with their hats and clubs. Oh, I'll hate them all right. But not now, now I'm scared and I just want the police to come help me like my teachers always told me they would. I am an anarchist.

Input Iterators

In the C++ Standard Template Library, iterators are a generalization of C's pointers. An input iterator is an iterator that supports the minimum operations necessary to get input:

• you're allowed to dereference them (so you can read data)
• you're allowed to increment them (so you can get to the next datapoint).

Notice that this means you're not allowed to do things like write to an input iterator (if you want to do that, you should be using an output iterator of some sort...) In many cases, this is all right. A simple example is if you're reading a set of ints from standard input:

vector<int> V;
copy(istream_iterator<int>(cin), istream_iterator<int>(), back_inserter(V));

In this tiny code snippet, we create a vector of ints where we're going to store the values we read in. The copy function copies from a range defined by a pair of input iterators to an output iterator. The back_inserter function creates an output iterator that writes values to the end of the supplied vector whenever it's written to.

The nice thing about these abstractions is that you can implement algorithms that can run on certain sorts of streams, before you know how the input stream is going to work. Not only that, but you can easily substitute one iterator for another one that acts the same way. Compare, for example, the following iterators:

• an iterator that's reading a sound sample from a microphone
• an iterator that's generating a sound sample by modelling a sine wave
• an iterator that's decoding a sound sample from an mp3 file

Why should you, as a programmer, care about where the sound sample is coming from? If you're programming in the way STL encourages, playing a sound from any of these sources can be done from the same function.

Using an input iterator

I hate it when people try to describe a concept in programming without giving a concrete example. So, in the following example, I'll show a program to encode or decode a message using a vigenere square, given the key. (If you don't have the key, then you'll probably want to look into breaking the vigenere square.) The way I've written it below, it only works with lowercase characters (it skips everything else) but by using the appropriate template instantiation, it'll work on any values.

#include <vector>
#include <iterator>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <cctype>   

using namespace std;

template <class T=unsigned char, T low_value='a', T high_value='z'>
class CodeWheel : public iterator<input_iterator_tag, T> {
  // a CodeWheel is an iterator that takes a message iterator and a
  // key vector, and encodes the message pointed to by the message
  // iterator using a vigenere cipher.
  //
  // the type T must be a numerical type.
  private:
    typedef typename vector<T>::iterator T_vector_iterator; 
    T_vector_iterator message_;
    vector<T> key_;
    T_vector_iterator key_iter_;

  public:    
    CodeWheel(T_vector_iterator message, vector<T> key) :
      message_(message), key_(key),
      key_iter_(key_.begin()) {}

    CodeWheel& operator++() { 
      message_++; 
      key_iter_++; 
      if (key_iter_ == key_.end())
        key_iter_ = key_.begin();
      return *this; 
    }

    CodeWheel operator++(int) {
      CodeWheel ret_val(*this);
      message_++;
      key_iter_++; 
      if (key_iter_ == key_.end())
        key_iter_ = key_.begin();
      return ret_val;
    }

    // This is where all the interesting work happens.  Note that since
    // this is an input iterator, it's returning const T (so we can't
    // change the value of what we return.)
    const T operator*() { 
      if (low_value <= (*message_) && (*message_) <= high_value) {
        T rotated_value = *message_ + *key_iter_ - (low_value-1);
	if (rotated_value > high_value) 
          return rotated_value - (high_value-low_value+1);
	else 
          return rotated_value;
      } else
        return (*message_);
    }

    bool operator==(const CodeWheel& x) {
      return x.message_ == message_;
    }
    
    bool operator!=(const CodeWheel& x) {
      return x.message_ != message_;
    }
};

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  if (argc < 2) {
    cerr << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " key [decode]" << endl
         << "Encodes stdin as a vigenere cipher with the appropriate key." 
         << endl
         << "If the second argument exists, decode, otherwise, encode."
         << endl;
    return 1;
  }
 
  string key_string = string(argv[1]);
  vector<unsigned char> key_vector;
  for (string::const_iterator i = key_string.begin(); 
       i != key_string.end(); 
       i++) {
    if (argc == 2) { // encode
      key_vector.push_back(static_cast<unsigned char>(*i));
    } else { // decode
      // if (*i) is the nth letter of the alphabet, then (*i) - 'a' + 1
      // is equal to n.  In order to reverse the shift of the nth letter
      // (thereby decoding it), we need to subtract n from 'z'.
      key_vector.push_back(static_cast<unsigned char>('z' - ((*i) - 'a' + 1)));
    }
  } 
  
  // read in message
  vector<unsigned char> message;
  unsigned char c;
  while (cin.get(static_cast<char>(c)))
    message.push_back(tolower(c));

  // output decoded message:
  for (CodeWheel<> i = CodeWheel<>(message.begin(), key_vector); 
       i != CodeWheel<>(message.end(), key_vector);
       i++)
    cout << (*i);

  return 0;
}

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References: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl - the sgi stl reference