I Can Get Some, Satisfaction. (That is, if you didn't recognize it, an allusion to the song "Satisfaction" by the aging British rock band the Rolling Stones.)
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It's not easy being me, but it sure is worthwhile.
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During the course of my life, I have devoted years at a time to my enthusiasms, and left behind major works for others to benefit from.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, I worked in the gay-rights movement, and achieved — or should have achieved — my greatest 'fame' for having first offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. Some people acknowledge that fact. Others don't.
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Why, pray, does one have to go to an Italian website to find this obvious fact explicitly recognized?

Il termine "gay pride" è stato proposto nel 1970 da Craig Schoonmaker, fondatore della rivista gay Homosexuals Intransigent!, per la prima dimostrazione in ricordo di Stonewall.

The morons at Wikipedia deleted an article about me (that, I hasten to point out, I did not write), after two earlier but unsuccessful attempts by my enemies to have it deleted.
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You see, when you have principles in the gay-rights movement, you make enemies of the people who have different principles — or none at all. Enemies from the spelling-reform movement, who oppose the particular reforms I offer, also joined in the drive to drive me out of Wikipedia.
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The discussion conceded that if I really did coin the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, then I would warrant inclusion in Wikipedia. What has to happen before a claim is accepted as fact, when after decades it is not disproved, nor even challenged?
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I first made, in print, the claim to have coined the term "Gay Pride", in 1971 (a year after I coined the term), then put it up on the Internet on March 26, 2001. It has been in archives of gay materials for 37 years, and on the Internet for over seven years. NO ONE has challenged it. No one has come up with an alternative origin for the term. No one. In 37 years.
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You'd think that 37 years without challenge would be enuf to establish the veracity of a claim, wouldn't you? But that is not, apparently, good enuf for Wikipedia.
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I don't need Wikipedia. I've appeared in Who's Who in America, basically for the next stage of my activism, co-founding and promoting the Expansionist Party of the United States.
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I worked at that, intently, for several years starting in early 1977, and achieved some minor success, with appearances on Canadian television, speeches at Canadian universities, and one front-page interview in the now-defunct Washington Star. The Toronto Globe and Mail even published an editorial cartoon about me, in August 1977, I believe. But people with no money can achieve almost nothing. And neither Canadians nor today's useless Americans were willing to exert themselves to bring Canada into the Union. So I moved on.
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In June 2000, I moved from Manhattan (NYC) to Newark, NJ, for various reasons having to do with economics and how unpleasant New York had become in the 35 years I lived there, during which time its population increased from 7 million to well over 8 million. In short order, Newark's population started to rise, such that between 2000 and 2005 Newark grew faster than any other major city in the Northeast. Everyone wants to be near me, don'tcha know.
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I continued to work in Manhattan for a couple of years, then made the transition to employment in Downtown Newark. In time, I transferred much of my enthusiasm from gay rights and Expansionism to boosting Newark. Mind you, I rarely or never give up on prior enthusiasms. I just downgrade them from primary concerns for which I exert myself mightily to secondary or tertiary concerns, for which I exert myself only occasionally and inconsistently.
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Since 2004, I have devoted an increasing portion of my free time to writing a blog about living in Newark. On January 7, 2006 I recast a text blog as a fotoblog, and have endeavored ever since to show at least one, and sometimes many, many fotos of Newark in each blog entry. My Newark fotoblog remains my major enthusiasm to this day.
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There are other things I want to do before my time runs out (I am 63 years old), such as write a book to promote my Fanetik spelling-reform system for English, which I have pursued side-by-side with other interests since about 1970. I might also like to organize a book by a group of men active in the gay-rights movement of the 1960s called something like "Before We Go", to try to impart to younger gay people what we went thru, what we intended, and how seriously wrong things have gone. Perhaps we can put things back on track. Perhaps not. It may be that gay people today are so crazy that no one can slap them back from their world of insanely anti-gay delusion. But we can hope.
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In any case, I am always busy. If, as sometimes happens, I cannot bring myself to update this blog, even for days at a time, it is probably because I am exerting myself mightily to add to my Newark blog, or write my Fanetik book, or put together a coffee-table book about Newark or a memoir by early gay activists — or some other enthusiasm that has seized control of my life in the intervening days.
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Did I say that it's an adventure being me?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,102 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:25 AM