Tea Partiers are not racist, Tea Partiers say (Photo: TBD Staff)

NOBODY HAS TO KNOW: Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff argues that Tea Partiers partake in "down-low homophobia." Not in the sense that they're all having gay sex under the radar, but in the sense that they are concealing their homophobia behind economic concerns until they reach office and get really empowered to start discriminating against gays. I got a similar impression when I embarked on my Tea Party adventure last August: Tea Partiers love publicly espousing their complete lack of hatred for sexual and racial minorities. Glenn Beck staged a multicultural religious conservative rally on the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington in which he incessantly invoked the Civil Rights movement in a racist display of how not-racist he is.

The rally was so smug in its totally-not-racism that it even alienated some racists. Back on a private Tea Party-only bus following the rally, one party member from Georgia felt comfortable divulging just how not-racist-enough the rally was for him. "I came here for the politics and to honor our troops," he told me. "Some of the social issues I don't want to hear about." Issues "like the race stuff"—any mention of Abraham Lincoln, slavery, Martin Luther King Jr., or segregation coming out of Glenn Beck's mouth. "They try to make it out like it's all white people's fault," he said of racism. But others are to blame: "Like Oprah and Obama." After all, "Barack Obama is the reason that everything's messed up. And he was elected because he's black."

NAKED LAWYERS are apparently quite sensitive about their naked lawyering, and allegedly shun those who will not join them:

Men would be holding hands and walking naked, blindfolded, through a forest. Then they would sit nude in groups of 30 to 50, passing around a wooden dildo and giving lurid details of their sexual history. Eggleston said he found out that the men will grab each other's penises if they wish.

Eggleston didn't like what he read and refused the invitation. Now he's suing the firm and his bosses, saying he was badgered, yelled at and ultimately had his pay slashed to zero for not attending the retreat, held at a Santa Barbara, Calif., mountain campground and sponsored by the ManKind Project, according to a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court.

UGH: Aaron Sorkin responds to charges of misogyny in The Social Network:

I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. They're very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren't women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

And this very disturbing attitude toward women isn't just confined to the guys who can't get dates.

I didn't invent the "F--k Truck", it's real--and the men (boys) at the final clubs think it's what they deserve for being who they are. (It's only fair to note that the women--bussed in from other schools for the "hot" parties, wait on line to get on that bus without anyone pointing guns at their heads.)

These women--whether it's the girls who are happy to take their clothes off and dance for the boys or Eduardo's psycho-girlfriend are real. I mean REALLY real. (In the case of Christy, Eduardo's girlfriend so beautifully played by Brenda Song, I conflated two characters--again I hope you'll trust me that doing that did nothing to alter our take on the events. Christy was the second of three characters whose name I changed.)

I invented two characters--one was Rashida Jones's "Marylin", the youngest lawyer on the team and a far cry from the other women we see in the movie. She's plainly serious, competent and, when asked, has no problem speaking the truth as she sees it to Mark. The other was Gretchen, Eduardo's lawyer (in reality there was a large team of litigators who all took turns deposing witnesses but I wanted us to become familiar with just one person--a woman, who, again, is nobody's trophy.

And Rooney Mara's Erica's a class act.

The problem with Sorkin's movie isn't that most of the women in it are incompetent, jealous bitches who kiss each other, take massive bong hits, and don't know how to play video games. The problem is that all the women—incompetent jealous bitch or no—are little more than stand-ins for actual human characters. Half of the women in the film are just bodies that exist to be half-naked. Rashida Jones's character may be a successful and competent lawyer, but she's an entirely frivolous character in the context of the film, where she exists only to take an interest in Zuckerberg and assure him that he's not an asshole (he is). Erica, Zuckerburg's love interest in the film, is fine; Christy, Eduardo's love interest, is not fine. Here Sorkin has a woman who attends Bill Gates lectures at Harvard presumably to hook up with the most promising computer geek in attendance, and Sorkin can't even give her a storyline that makes any sense? She's there to simply exist as Eduardo's girlfriend for three-fourths of the picture until she inexplicably begins stalking him and lights his dorm room on fire. This portion of her "character" is engineered and resolved within ten minutes. The problem isn't that Sorkin's women aren't "classy " enough—the problem is that they aren't written enough.

Events! GAY BAR EFN Lounge, briefly closed, is back to host next weekend's Mixtape dance party. Commenter calls it "ZOMBIE EFN." DEFEND YOURSELF will be holding an LGBTQ self-defense course on Oct. 23. And feminist activist GLORIA FELDT will discuss her new book tomorrow at Busboys & Poets on K.