. . . but still better than most of the summer garbage on TV.

After my little rave about how much I enjoyed the first episode of Kept, of all things, it took exactly one more episode to lose its charm.

These guys were just too trashy and idiotic, even to laugh at.

At first it was hysterical to watch how quickly Jerry Hall saw right through Ricardo Suave's blatant insincerity, and to see her take on their encounters edited against his. But then we still have to watch him. And he is insufferable. I don't care how good he looks. And he does look good. Really good. But sorry, no one is that pretty.

Then again, maybe I was just in a bad mood. I was, but I think it's more than that. Missed the third ep, watching the fourth. It's got its moments. Like when Jerry sends them to conversation school--no seriously, and Ricardo's narcissist buddy Slavco says,

"It's common sense. If you do not conversate with someone, then, you know, she isn't, she wouldn't want you."

Yes of course it's cruel to cackle at the caged animals under ordinary circumstances. But when Slavco and Ricardo spend every waking moment coifing their hair and exchanges assurances of superiority, they're asking for it.

It helps that all the other guys hate the pair of them. At least they have a little taste. And it also helped that in the first episode, Jerry accused Ricardo of wearing makeup. His denial was edited against her later sneering that he had more makeup on than she did.

Later in this episode, at a staged press conference, one of the reporters asks Slavco, "Do you consider yourself a sycophant?" Jerry leans in toward her girlfriend, and chuckles about the likelihood that Slavco will be familiar with the term. "Uh, can you define the last word," he asks.

Not bad recovery, actually. Whole lot better than trying to fake it. Might have been a letdown if not for cut to Jerry and girlfriend exchanging appalled glances.

I'm confident that this will at least be one of the reality shows with a deserving winner. I have no doubt Jerry is going to weed out all the biggest jerks, though they gave her quite a few of those to start with.

What they're actually going to "win," exactly is a little dubious. But I'm once again having medium fun watching.

There is an absolutely wonderful piece up on Slate, called Crying, While Eating. A first-person account from the founder of the site by that name, who's primarily a writer for a living, and it shows. The setup:

I had signed up for a "contagious media" contest. The rules: Make a (nonpornographic) Web site. Promote it any way you want, short of paid advertisements. The page with the most visitors after three weeks wins.

He and his partner came up with CryingWhileEating.com, which is exactly what it claims to be: a bunch of short video clips of people crying over oddball or mundane things, while eating.

And then:

Crying, While Eating launched on a Thursday night with 12 videos. Christy, who was drinking a vanilla shake, cried because she was "good at lots of things, but not great at anything." Tashi lamented the fact that "sex will never be that good again" while munching on Milano cookies. I ate buckwheat noodles with rooster sauce and blubbered about having "ruined Passover."

We waited until the next morning to send a batch of self-promotional e-mails. By the time we got out of bed, the blog Waxy had spotted our page on the contest Web site. From there, we got picked up by BoingBoing and Metafilter. I e-mailed the URL to a former co-worker in San Francisco that afternoon. He said he'd already gotten it from another friend in California, who had gotten the link from a guy in Austin, Texas. When I checked the stats that night, we had almost 50,000 visitors.

By May, they had 7.5 million hits.

It's a fascinating story about how and why web ideas travel, how certain quirky little sites become overnight phenoms.

I learned a lot. And laughed my ass off the whole way. I think you'll like it.

If you're straight and you're puzzled that your world just feels a little -- less colorful? -- this weekend, don't worry, it will be back to normal by Monday. You just scheduled your party for the wrong weekend.

Because all us gayboys and lesbos will be off celebrating gay pride for the next three days. At least in most of our larger cities.  Even Denver. (And that means most of the smaller towns have been drained of all homos, who head to the cultural centers for an annual gasp of . . . well, maybe not culture.)

Depending where you live, this may actually cause you to see more of us--a parade route blocking your journey, or perhaps invading your TV set; the stereotypically-outrageous photo every newspaper editor in America will choose for the front page Monday morning . . . (Or have we drifted back to an inside page now?)

But you'll prolly find us MIA from any of your parties or outings this weekend. So wish us well. We're about to have a blast.

---

Now. For all you breeders rolling your eyes about why the hell we need to be so proud about being gay.

First, I know where you're coming from. I said the same damn thing when I was a straightboy. Which seemed to last forever, in my case. But here's the deal:

We're not proud that we're gay. We're proud of who we are, in spite of being gay.

And yes, it's necessary. Figuring out your gay is pretty devastating to most of us. Yeah, because you and me and all the rest of us make it pretty horrible, or at least the idea of it pretty damn horrible. It does one hell of a number on our self esteem. Takes our whole freaking lives to get over it. Most of us never really get over it completely.

So once a year, we take a weekend to come together and have a ball, have a really great time, feel good about ourselves for a few days and hopefully recover a few scraps of that self esteem we're pretty sure has to be buried in there somewhere.

Part of the power is just seeing how many of us there are, seeing all the invisible gays swarm in from the small towns and suburbia, and realizing we're not such odd uncommon creatures. There are millions of us.

(I checked IDs at a charity liquor garden a few years, and about half the licences were from Colorado the other half from places like New Mexico, Nebraska, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota . . . What the hell is life like for those people the other 362 days?)

And for some people there's still an overt political action, but for most of us now it's just a great big annual party. A much bigger, broader, more diverse party than we have all year. And we could really use one.

---

(And if that all sounds totally retarded or maybe if it makes you dig a little deeper, try the Village Voice's annual Queer Issue.)

Well. Sex and . . . romance, perhaps.

So I logged onto gay.com yesterday morning--and here's the disclaimer: gay.com includes a lot more than just a place to meet guys for "dates," but that seems to be its main role in life, or at least among my demo.

So I log on and nearly all the pictures are replaced with one of those big red roadsign signals for NO!--a red circle with a diagonal slash through it--followed by the text: "ADULT PHOTOS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE DUE TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION."

Hmmmmmm.

They have a lengthy manifesto here, but I'll provide the opening for all of you too lazy to click:

CENSORED! BY US GOVERNMENT!
Changes to our photo policy mandated by the Bush Administration
Always on the lookout for hot guys and ways to keep people from having fun, the US Dept. of Justice is taking a break from prosecuting terrorists to do something they think is more important: restricting your right to view and share photos online.

All member photos identified as adult on our site are temporarily unavailable for public view, due to the sudden, and unconstitutional, decision by the US Dept. of Justice to place new restrictions on all web sites around the world that do business in the US (I guess nobody ever told them the internet is borderless). Gay.com thinks your adult photos should be sexy, secure, and legally protected, so we've joined with other companies to seek an injunction against this ruling. We're doing everything possible to minimize its impact on you.

They say just adult photos, but at first it was nearly all photos. They gradually added more and more back throughout the day--but just the "clean" ones.

Update:

Well, the battle seems to be over. Hard to tell whether they came to a sudden agreement, or it was all a publicity stunt. (A well-intentioned and very necessary stunt perhaps, but . . .)

Here's the new message:

Legal victory over government censorship!
Gay.com is back to normal — hot, fun and uncensored!

We bent over backwards to defend your right to view and share photos of guys bending over. Adult photos and Video Chat on our site are once again available for public viewing by consenting adults — thanks to an agreement that stops the U.S. Dept. of Justice from expanding restrictions on online content. The current agreement only protects plaintiffs and sites that belong to the Free Speech Coalition, of which Gay.com is a member.

There are many other web sites and companies that are NOT PROTECTED under this agreement.

We've won this battle, but the war's not over. We have joined with other companies to continue the legal fight and overturn the restrictions altogether. Since the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has already found these restrictions (18 U.S.C. §2257, for all you legal queens) to be unconstitutional, we're confident that freedom and hot gay sex will ultimately prevail over the forces of censorship and oppression. After all, the guys at the Dept. of Justice need dates, too.

To find out what you can do to help, see below.

For my readers, you'll have to follow the link for the rest.

And I have a feeling Radar is going to have something about it soon. Check with them later today.