Suburbia

So... a few quick items. Was reading The Oil Drum blog last night and saw the trailer for Escape from Suburbia, the sequel to the 2004 documentary, The End of Suburbia. Haven't seen the original, but it certainly reminds me of one of the key themes of James Howard Kunstler's great book, The Long Emergency. Kunstler makes the case that the U.S. spent the vast majority of its post-WWII wealth on building suburbia, a way of life totally dependent on cheap fossil fuels. As the supply of that cheap energy begins to dwindle, Kunstler and these documentary filmmakers suggest that those in the suburbs are in for tough times.

NOT PARTICULARLY RELATED unless a lot of the older gay men who used to live in San Francisco have moved to the suburbs, I ran across these statistics on the local gay population in an article in the Bay Area Reporter last month:

The day began with an overlook of who makes up San Francisco's gay male population. The city estimates there are 63,577 gay men living in San Francisco, an increase of more than 10,000 over the last five years. About 75 percent of those men are between the ages of 21 and 40, while 14,000 are HIV-positive. [Italics added]

The majority are Caucasian, at 66 percent, with Latinos the next largest group at 13 percent. African Americans and Asians comprise 6 percent each.

I have to admit to being a bit astonished to find that 75% of the gay populatlion here is younger than me! :-)

The other explanation, of course, is that much of the older population died of AIDS in the 80s and 90s, but I would have thought that a lot of younger men would have entered the post-40 population during the past 12 years since protease inhibitors came on the market and so altered the progression of the disease in western countries. Hmm... more research.

AND FINALLY, AN UPDATE ON ANN COULTER'S slurring of John Edwards as a "faggot" at the Conservative Political Action Committee's conference last week. Check out conservative (and gay) writer Andrew Sullivan's thoughts on the matter in his Daily Dish blog today. (Sullivan, by they way, wrote a lengthy essay on living with AIDS in the age of protease inhibitors in his excellent book, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival.