Phyllis Lyon (left) and Del Martin, lesbian activists who have been together for over 50 years, embrace during their marriage ceremony at San Francisco City Hall in 2004. (Chronicle photo by Liz Mangelsdorf )

It’s a beautiful, balmy evening here in the east bay, but the mood in my neighborhood is uncharacteristically quiet, even somber. In a few hours, the California Supreme Court will publicly rule on the legality of this state’s ban on gay marriage. The tension is palpable.

In 2004, in a remarkable act of civil disobedience, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed thousands of gay and lesbian couples to wed before the courts stepped in and disallowed the marriage licenses. Debate has been raging ever since, with civil rights activists and SF city officials challenging the state family code law that restricts marriage to a man and a woman, and a SF trial judge declaring the ban unconstitutional. In 2006, a conflicted appeals court upheld the ban, stating that it should be up to voters or legislators to legalize same-sex marriages, rather than judges.

Conservative interest groups and the state attorney general are defending the ban, and the justices have remained divided. It could go either way. Regardless of what happens at 10am, Pacific Standard Time, it’s going to be a historic day.

Fingers crossed, everyone.

EDIT (12:15pm, 03/15/08): WOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!

Yeah. Hurray for “alternative beauty.” Photo by Mojokiss.

Catwalk Tragedy 4, the East Coast’s biggest “alternative beauty pageant,” took place in Philly last weekend. Having been to the first Catwalk Tragedy, which was the closest I’ve ever seen my beloved goth scene morph into a drunken frat party in a trailer park on Mardi Gras weekend, I was curious how this larger-scale endeavor would play out. With more of everything - sponsors, judges, contestants - would it be a be a creative talent show or an even bigger sleazefest?

The judges this time were a respectable and diverse bunch, which gave me hope: my friends Kambriel, Apnea and Philip (Lithium Picnic) were on the panel, as well as two individuals less known to me; Jayla Rubinelli from America’s Next Top Model and Joey Martini, a burlesque emcee/performer.

Kambriel: “I think Joey’s face pretty much says it all with whatever was going on in that moment!”

With such a mix of judges I hoped that the event would be more classy this year, but alas! This year, it was the contestants dropped the ball. A belly dancer Tempest tells it:

The competition was set up boys and girls – meaning each gender had it’s own category. The contestants were given a top from one of the sponsors to alter as they wish, as long as the logo was intact. There was somewhat of a slut factor involved in the presentation of some of the girls, but I didn’t think much of it. Short micro-mini’s are rampant (or were, they seem to be going out from the latest batch of Gothic trends), but it was mainly a lot of boob gesturing, but hey, if you got ‘em, flaunt ‘em right? The boys were more tame in general. Both groups seem rather inexperienced with the concept of modeling, especially with walking, but hey, competitions can be nerve-wracking right?

The third round was freestyle – the model’s own choosing and to really show off their stuff. It was here that my brain had nothing short of a minor meltdown. Out of perhaps 20 girls, no more than 3 didn’t do something akin to stripper routine, and even then, they were borderline. Again, I don’t have anything against strippers, and I love burlesque, but this wasn’t burlesque, and I’m sure better strip shows could be had at the Foxy Lady’s “Legs & Eggs” morning strip events. (New Englanders everywhere just cringed massively.) Apparently “crowd reaction” was a judging category for this round, and the great majority figured that the best way to do this was to strip. After the first few, it was “oh look, another set of boobs and pasties” again and again. I was surrounded by male colleagues and they weren’t impressed in the least (and yes, they were mostly straight). I wondered what the boys would do…

The boy’s third round was a much different story. Yeap, there were a few strip routines in there, but the majority of them danced and really showed off their moves, their agility, and their PERSONALITY…mainly, it was a reversal of the girls’ round.

Oh, Philly girls. How you disappoint! Unless you were all from Jersey, in which case I understand. But the story has a happy ending. “In the end,” Tempest writes, “the winners were the ones who showed personality and really showed off the clothes in how they presented themselves (and for the most part, kept their clothes on.)” Kudos to the judges for making that call. And don’t get me wrong; you know we love hot girls in corsets! It’s just when those crucial ingredients of creativity and ownership are missing that it becomes a little sad.

To end this on a light note, here is a video of male stripping from Catwalk Tragedy that made me want to laugh and weep at the same time.

The scene is Asheville, a small city in North Carolina with a much higher than average activist population, on a gusty day in late March. A line of about 60 people winds their way up through the center of downtown. In time to the pitter-patter of drumsticks on empty caulking buckets, they call and respond.

“What do we want?”/ “Peace!”/ “When do we want it?” Pause. “Now!” Off-kilter choruses of “there ain’t no power like the power of the people cause the power of the people don’t stop!” break out as the march continues. A single police car ambles by.

It was, on that afternoon, five years since the beginning of the Iraq war –- and protest was the order of the day, coast to coast. A thousand mustered in Washington, D.C. Some attempted to rope off the IRS building with crime scene tape, others harangued contractors from corporations such as Halliburton and Lockheed Martin. Los Angeles had 10,000, San Francisco 7,500 (including bike brigades). There were, as in previous years, the predictable smattering of arrests.

At night, on cue, there were vigils.

Clearer this year than ever is the fact that these protests are not a political movement. Instead the protesters have become another in a sea of alternative cultures. The signs, art and displays now less for the purpose of enacting actual change than engaging in an affirming ritual, hanging out with friends and self-expression. Despite the massive rise in the number of Americans against the war, protest attendance has actually declined.

Three days later, long after the protesters faded, American casualties in Iraq reached 4,000. The Iraqi dead are, literally, countless. As you read this, the blood continues to flow.

Coilhouse, is, of course, a love letter to alternative culture (says so right there in the mission statement). In many cases, all that’s expected from such a culture is affirming ritual, hanging out with friends and self-expression — serving to make the world more weird and wonderful than it was before. There can, of course, be political and social aims as well, but rarely are they the primary focus.

However, the devolution of the protest from political method to cultural theater is different. This is something intended for a particular purpose — to push society towards a goal — and touted as working towards that end by the organizers, groups and individuals who engage in it. In fact, the goals have been abandoned: these days, people go to protests like they do concerts.

Restoring this post after this weekend’s spam-fest; apologies if it appears in your RSS Reader twice.

Here’s something that won’t be around forever: a French MySpace page that catalogues 1,428 images devoted to the bob hairstyle and its derivatives. Brooksie would be proud!

Looking through the images in rapid succession was like shaking a grayscale kaleidoscope of eyes, lips and hair angles into constant new configurations, a delightful experience that left me feeling awed and inspired. I wondered if I should be feeling a twinge of guilt for ravenously going through what can be classified as “stolen images” that have been gathered from the web, scanned from magazines and even manipulated without credit. And then it hit me: I don’t care.

Of course knowing the artists’ names would’ve been nice, but I accept that it may have been impossible to compile that information. I enjoyed the site anyway. Was that wrong? Depends on where you think the line of theft gets crossed. Of all places, I’ve observed that the most embarrassing attitudes towards image theft come from within the alt photo/modeling scene. What I mean to say is: no one has bigger or uglier watermarks than alt photographers.

Womens’ correctional facilities are the ultimate sleep-over party with all the trappings: pajamas, bunk beds, in-fighting, sloppy joes, getting touched up under the covers, and being told when to go to bed. Some prisons even let the girls play dress-up. Miss America, meet Miss Demeanor:

To be fair, it’s primarily inmates who organize these shows. It’s an increasingly popular phenomenon, with womens’ prisons hosting beauty pageants in Russia, Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Angola and the Philippines, amongst others, with working titles like Miss Captivity. The idea is to ‘boost’ the self-esteem of (at least the better looking portion of) the prison population.

There is arguably an obvious exploitative angle in this, one which perpetuates gender and class divisions in a place where women are their most vulnerable. The media is only too happy to join in, throwing the spotlight on the tragedy of a pretty young woman in distress, putting herself on display. A beauty contest under these conditions probably does next to nothing for the self esteem or prospects of the contestants in any meaningful way.

It’s almost a perverse caricature of a parole board hearing in a Van Halen video, an effort to charm your way into garnering favour from you captors and respite from your situation by any measure necessary. Having said that, spending years trapped like an animal in a gray, clinical dorm framed in razor wire, any warm-blooded woman would thirst for anything beautiful in her world. Participation in these productions transiently refashions the contestant from a shoplifter or drug addict into a graceful, sophisticated and beautiful person of seeming worth, if only for one evening. Who could condemn the contestants for their humble aspirations and for enjoying an event which breaks up the tedium of Gilligan’s Island re-runs on prison TV?

Trailer for Miss Gulag, a 2006 Documentary:

Adam Shepard, this one’s for you:

Shepard is the author of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream, a book that’s getting an awful lot of buzz right now. From an article at the CSM:

Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor’s degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charles­ton, S.C. But Shepard’s descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents’ home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education. During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

Adam Shepard asks, who is John Galt? No, really… who is he? Why are you laughing? (photo by Nicole Hill)

I’ll preface my opinions by stating that I believe wholeheartedly in the power of self-perpetuating positivity, of elbow grease over idle hope. Self-pity is certainly one of the more corrosive emotions in the human canon, and I have to think that even in the most dire circumstances, one can improve a bad situation by somehow preserving their sense of self-worth. (Easier said than done, of course.) That being stated, Scratch Beginnings is a self-aggrandizing, dishonest account that does not deserve the hype.

A fresh-faced, educated young man in excellent mental and physical health who keeps an emergency credit card tucked into his back pocket isn’t starting from scratch. He’s starting from privilege. Shepard has had a lifetime of parental “you can be anything you want to be, sweetie” hand-holding to bolster him. It shows in every page of his solipsistic account.

Her Modesty is a Muslim Fashion blog that will soon be a print magazine.

I’ve been reading Her Modesty, a Muslim women’s fashion blog. The project has a lot in common with Coilhouse: both Coilhouse and Her Modesty are blogs that will soon launch in print magazine format, both extoll the virtues of being covered vs. letting it all hang out (you may have noticed our obsession with covered necks, loosely-flowing clothes and total body coverage), and most importantly, both Her Modesty and Coilhouse are interested in the tenuous relationship between the “mainstream” and the “underground,” and where one stops and the other begins. They’re two different “undergrounds,” but the concerns are largely the same.

Primarily a fashion blog, Her Modesty’s main purpose is to display “how sisters can be covered but yet still feel good about themselves and how they look.” The blog author, Kima, obsessively catalogues her new favorite trends as inspired by street wear and the runway, follows the appearance of the hijab-inspired styles in Western fashion magazines, and offers readers tips on how to create the “modest version” of various popular styles. My favorite is this outfit, which in the author’s opinion walks the line, though her readers seem to love it.

Haute Hijab from the Her Modesty blog.

Kima’s writing tone reminds me of the sweet and upbeat Gala Darling, and similarly to Gala, Kima also challenges the readers by briging topics for discussion into the fashion mix. In one post, Kima posts a loose leopard-print D&G dress that resembles an abaya (the loose overgarment that’s worn by many Muslim women), and asks her readers, “would you rock it with a shiny red bag, black pumps, and a hijab?” In another post, Kima engages the readers in an interesting debate about the female “fashion police” in Iran. Similarly to my obsession with goths in TV commercials, there’s a post about a hijab-wearing girl in a Sunsilk TV ad. The most profound post, one where I almost felt like a voyeur when reading the impassioned comments, is the post where Kima asks readers if they’d still dress modestly if Allah didn’t will it.

But the best part are the hilarious Muslim Fashion Dont’s! Here they are, after the jump.