With the economy in shambles this holiday season, I hear the same two questions again and again from my readers:

1) How can I continue to give unique, luxurious gifts that my friends will adore without breaking my budget?

2) Where can I find gifts that bring back memories of a happier, simpler time—a time when all of us could achieve our dreams, even if that dream was to start an interior design firm staffed by headstrong, opinionated women and a sassy black man with a criminal record?

Well, dear reader, you need look no further than FrugalFag.com/Fashion. Why, you ask? Because, from now until Christmas day, when you order a Night the Lights Went out in Georgia T-shirt, you’ll get a second shirt absolutely free! After selecting the size of your first shirt, mention in the PayPal “instructions for merchant” area if you’d prefer a small, medium, or large* for your additional tee. (You should see a link that says something along the lines of “add special instructions for merchant” which will let you add a note, or you can just email me at frugal[at]frugalfag.com with the info.)

Keep one for yourself! Use one as a hilarious and absorbent way to clean up after sensual encounters! (Nothing breaks post-coital tension like a Julia Sugarbaker quote-fest.) Give one to a straight man and laugh at his confusion when older gay gentlemen flirt with him at the mall! The benefits of owning this timeless tee are endless, but this offer is not, so act now.

*I don’t want to cause a panic, but I feel I should mention that I only have two more larges and I’m not planning to print more any time soon. (Let’s just say I may have overestimated demand for Designing-Women-themed apparel, especially among skinny twinks.) So, if you have your heart set on a large, don’t delay.

S|Sense is a clothing boutique in Montreal that sells ultra-hip, high-end clothing for men and women. They’re having a 30%-off-everything sale until December 1st, so this is a great chance to treat yourself to something you’ll love and wear for a long time. Here are a few of my favorite picks from the outerwear section:

Mackage Seal Mix Grey Overcoat (Shown in photo.)

Refrigiwear Blinket Brown Jacket

Diesel Weighy Black Wool Peacoat

Energie Jabyl White Jacket

Energie Arhus Blue Jacket

Drykorn Basel Black Coat

If you’re on the hunt for an HDTV this holiday season, the options and jargon can be a bit overwhelming. I just came across this HDTV buying guide from buy.com that can be a good starting point if you need help with the basics.

I’m shopping around for a big, bargain-priced TV myself these days, and I’m planning to write a short post on the subject when I finally settle on what I’m buying and where I’m buying it. In the mean time, I will say that this 46″ Sharp Aquos at New Egg for $999 has caught my eye, and I’m also interested in this 52″ Sharp Aquos at buy.com for $1,199 (after rebate). Just FYI, I’m not on Sharp’s payroll. It just happens that the best prices I’ve seen so far on TVs with fairly good reputations have been Sharps. (Update: I just read some bad reviews of the Aquos models I was checking out. I’ll try to post a follow up soon.)

Back when MP3s were just a glimmer in a programmer’s eye, albums were treated with more reverence. It wasn’t just that more people purchased CDs, it was that putting a disc in your CD player and firing it up required a certain level of commitment and patience. Sure, you could change your mind and put in something else, but it wasn’t an easy task to wedge a disc back into its proper sleeve, find another, extract it, and insert it into a tiny slot in the dash all while staying between the lines at 70 miles an hour.

Digital music players have made it easy for all of us to develop a bit of musical attention deficit disorder. I rarely listen to my favorite old songs any more, and when I do, my mind wanders and I find myself skipping to something new before the first song is done. It’s hard to imagine going back to the days when all my musical cravings weren’t just a click away, which is why I was dismayed to find the car I rented a few days ago for a business trip had no auxiliary input jack.

Although I was initially sad to leave my iPod at home, I tried to look on the bright side: my road trip would give me a chance to reconnect with some of my favorite oldies. So, I dusted off my CD collection and spent several minutes arming myself for the five-hour drive. To kick off the trip, I listened to my favorite songs on Relish and remembered how much I love the raspy grittiness of Joan Osbourne’s voice. With nearly fifteen years to forget how overplayed “One of Us” once was, the song suddenly felt like a quaint, undiscovered gem. I stared out at the monotonous, corn-flanked highway and smiled, remembering how Joan made every rebellious teenage girl in America want a nose ring of her very own. I also spent some time with Aimee Mann and I listened to several of Michael Jackson’s greatest hits, recalling where I was when the music videos for “Black or White” and “Remember the Time” premiered. I brought along Emotions to ensure I’d have a little classic Mariah on hand, and I observed a moment of silence to mourn the day she traded in her sensible tops and jeans for hoochie shorts and airbrushed tank-tops.

It was nice to spend quality time with all of my adolescent idols, but one diva kept me company longer than any other. Her growling, powerful voice always takes me back to a simpler time when I still thought I might be a straight boy who just happened to be very into good skin care, musicals, interior decorating, and getting out of gym by being a teacher’s aide. I’m speaking, of course, about Taylor Dayne.

Now, I realize some of you might not be familiar with all of Taylor’s work. I can understand if you don’t own two copies of Soul Dancing, and if you’re straight, I could probably forgive your failure to purchase the maxi-single of “Naked Without You.” But if you don’t own Taylor Dayne’s Greatest Hits, I’m afraid we simply can’t be friends any more. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that Taylor Dayne songs elicit certain involuntary responses in me, such as singing into hairbrushes and/or broom handles and taking both hands off the steering wheel to punctuate choruses with faggy swishing and pointing. I find I eventually sabotage all relationships with people who lack this reflex. I’ve never completely forgiven my mother for botching the lyrics to “Tell It To My Heart” during our 2002 Christmas karaoke performance, so I’m sure you’ll understand that I can’t have blog readers who don’t even own her seminal compilation of timeless high-energy hits and sultry ballads.

Taylor Dayne was no one-hit wonder, but most people forget how many of her songs they actually know. Fortunately, there’s a convenient megamix of her greatest hits on YouTube if you need a refresher. However, to truly appreciate Taylor, nothing beats the inconvenient, high-fidelity glory of a compact disc. It may not be as easy to click and shuffle your way to another artist when your attention span wanes. Yet, listening to at least a few tracks from the same album gives musicians the respect they deserve and honors the dignity of their work.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to listen to every track on several CDs I fished out of a dumpster behind a pawn shop in 1998. Looking over these albums after my road trip, I find myself asking what hundreds of thousands of CD-buying teenagers must have asked many years ago: could there be more to Aqua than just “Barbie Girl”? Could “C’mon ‘N Ride It (The Train)” be just the beginning of a musical revolution brought to us by the Quad City DJs? Only an open-mind and a two-hour listening party will tell.

The Chicago Public School system’s plan for a gay-friendly high school are on hold for at least a year, and I have mixed feelings about the whole situation. It seems the people leading the effort to start the school were pressured to remove almost all the gayness from their original proposal, which led to disagreement within the committee on how much the language should be watered down. Unable to find an immediate compromise, the team decided to wait until next year to revise and submit the proposal. Here are a few of the specifics from the Sun-Times:

They changed the name of the school from the High School for Social Justice Pride Campus to the Social Justice Solidarity High School. They removed language saying the school would address the “needs of the underserved population of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning youth and their Allies (LGBTQA)” in favor of language that said the school would address “city-wide concerns over violence, bullying and harassment.”

Other references to gays were stripped from the description of the school’s social studies and fine arts curriculum, but kept as part of its literature component. The revised plan also kept a planned “GLBTQ Studies” elective.

Obviously the concept of a gay-friendly high school brings up a lot of controversial questions. Doesn’t everyone get teased? Aren’t we discouraging tolerance by making schools less diverse? Don’t all kids need to learn how to cope with teasing? And most importantly, what will happen to the theater and choir programs at non-magnet schools when all the gays disappear?

I think all the concerns about gay-friendly magnet schools are completely legit. I understand why many people feel that this is not the solution to harassment and bullying problems in public schools. However, as a magnet-school alum, my own experience makes it impossible for me to be objective on this.

I’ve been setting off people’s gaydar since I was five and I spent my formative years attending a public school in a small, über-Baptist town in Alabama. I wasn’t just teased—I was terrorized. From middle school through sophomore year, I went to great lengths to avoid having the shit beaten out of me on a regular basis. I searched my school handbook for every loophole that might get me out of gym class and I took every honors course I could. Still, I couldn’t avoid the cafeteria, and when kids would throw food in my hair day after day, I got really good at pretending it was just a recurring accident. I couldn’t avoid shared hallways, but I did learn to avoid the areas that no teachers watched over. I couldn’t avoid going to my locker, but I did learn to access it in record time while keeping an eye out for the latest guy who had threatened to kick my ass.

My house was the last stop on a 45-minute bus route that went through multiple trailer parks. I was usually able to create a buffer between me and the deer-hunting, mullet-sporting guys who hated my faggy guts. I had enough female friends on the bus to keep the bullies a few seats away, but I couldn’t afford for any of them to be out sick. Even a small hole in my fortification could free up a place for the enemy in an adjacent seat.

At the start of my junior year, I made my escape to a magnet boarding school. While the school had no gay-friendly mission statement, it was full of nerdy misfits from around the state. That campus was my own little Israel—a five-acre reparation for the Holocaust that was my public-school education. (Except in the Jewish Holocaust, people were deprived of food and forced to perform manual labor for the very people who hated them, while I was deprived of rigorous foreign-language courses and pressured to go to Wednesday night bible study at the First Baptist Church.)

In the end, I think it’s wise for Chicago’s gay-friendly high school to broaden its mission. A magnet school focused on creating a safe, supportive learning environment through tolerance is something I can wholeheartedly support. In the end, I realize that might not make it much different from most other magnet schools. But I’m o.k. with that because I believe in the importance of magnet schools in general. I know first-hand that magnets can serve as incubators for innovative approaches to education, where the staff are able test experimental policies and new teaching strategies that could prove useful in other schools once they’re refined.

I believe there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to the problems that currently plague public schools. Different students have different needs that specialized schools are better equipped to address. I’d love to see all schools adopt zero-tolerance policies on bullying and affirm in writing that they do not allow discrimination or harassment on the basis of sexual orientation. But in the mean time, there are kids who face serious challenges if they’re forced to remain in their current schools—and I’m not just talking about the kids who face the serious challenge of an atomic wedgie or a lemon swirly. I’m talking about kids who might drop out or kill themselves because they feel completely alone or fear for their safety. I’m talking about kids who will struggle to accept themselves for years or decades because they never heard they might be fine just the way they are.

I don’t believe that these kids need to suffer because it builds character and prepares them for the real world. (In the real world, my boss doesn’t pull my pants down at a meeting and write butt pirate on my forehead with a Sharpie.) At the same time, I don’t think it’s necessary to create a school just for gay kids, and I realize that even a school for gay kids can’t protect children from the social traumas of adolescence. However, I do think school shouldn’t make anyone want to die. For now, I think magnet schools offer the most immediate solution to ensure that kids don’t fall through the cracks because they don’t fit in. Of course, I’m also open to subsidizing gangs of teenage drag-queens who offer protection in exchange for sequins and acrylic nails.

I’ve always been drawn to books with dramatic and suspenseful storylines that also provide an accurate, insider view of a foreign culture. I love how The Good Earth follows a Chinese peasant farmer as he struggles to pull himself and his family out of abject poverty and goes on to amass incredible wealth. There’s plenty to keep the reader engaged, from famine and foot binding to concubines and opium abuse. But what I really love is how the book provides a fly-on-the-wall view of Chinese culture, economics, and politics in the early 1900s. When I read The Poisonwood Bible several months ago, I loved it for similar reasons. The story reveals how the Congo transitioned from a Belgian colony exploited by the West for natural resources like cobalt and diamonds to an independent nation exploited by its own corrupt and ruthless dictators. It’s full of conflict and danger, and along the way I happened to learn a lot about the nation that is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

My interest in riveting narratives with a healthy dose of history and sociology led me to my most recent read, Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked the book up while browsing a random shelf at my local library, but I was quickly sucked in by the first-hand account of the author’s experience growing up in conservative Muslim countries like Somalia and Saudi Arabia. Although Ali spent much of her childhood in predominantly Christian Kenya, her family’s fundamentalist Muslim beliefs leave her trapped in a world where women are subservient above all else. Eventually, Ali becomes a refugee in the Netherlands and is later elected to the Dutch parliament. (This fact is mentioned on the dust jacket for the book, so I don’t think I’m spoiling the book for anyone.) She quickly becomes an outspoken advocate for Muslim women and children’s rights and opposes the Dutch government’s laissez-fair attitude toward Muslim immigrants in the name of religious tolerance. Her career in Dutch politics is short-lived, however, as death threats begin pouring in from Muslims in the Netherlands and around the world. (The shit really hits the fan when she calls the prophet Mohammed a pervert and makes a short film in which half-naked women are shown with sexist verses of the Koran written on their bodies.)

Today, Ali is living in the U.S. and her website asks for donations to pay for the 24-hour bodyguards who prevent Muslims from killing her in the name of Allah. She’d seem completely paranoid if it wasn’t for the fact that the man who directed her film had his throat slit in broad daylight on a crowded street in Amsterdam. The fact that he also had a note stabbed into his chest warning Ali that she was next also probably justifies her concern.

Many of Ali’s critics claim she is a Muslim Uncle Tom, an opportunist who is now selling out her people by making sweeping generalizations about Muslim culture and fanning the flames of “Islamophobia.” However, after reading her story, she definitely made me reconsider how much we should compromise in the name of religious tolerance and how much we should try to change people and cultures in the name of human rights. At some point in the next few months, I’m planning to read Who Speaks for Islam in an effort to get a more well-rounded perspective on the issue.

A friend of mine recently sent me link to a great news story from Pooler, a small town in Southeast Georgia near my old stomping grounds in Savannah. (Yes, I have a lot of old stomping grounds.) Apparently, Dr. Kim (a white pediatrician married to an Asian man) has had it up to here with her incompetent staff and the election of Obama pushed her over the edge. As a result, she sent her employees the memo shown below.

For more, you can read the full article on the WSAV.com website.

I hate to be a downer, but when is some news network going to take a break from the Obama mania to point out that California’s gay marriage ban has passed? I’m as happy as the next Democrat that Obama won, but when is someone going to stop talking about how his election represents a quantum leap forward in the fight for civil rights and note that Obama would have had his ass handed to him if he had openly supported gay marriage?

More importantly, will anyone ever mention that in the exit polls, 70% of African-Americans voted in favor of the ban, while only 47% of white Californians supported it? Adding insult to injury, the ban on gay marriage in Florida has passed by a huge margin, with 71% of African-Americans voting in favor of it vs. 60% of whites. It boggles my mind that black people went to the polls in droves, literally tearing up as they cast their votes for Obama. They talked to news reporters over and over, describing how a black man in the white house could finally prove that we can all be treated equally and achieve our dreams. Then, seconds later, on that SAME BALLOT, three out of four black people voted to deny another minority the right to marry. Initially, I assumed this number must be the result of homophobic black men offsetting the gay-friendly voting habits of black women. Then I noticed that 76% of black women voted for the ban! So let this be a warning to you, Mo’nique. You better renounce the vile voting habits of your fellow sistahs before you find yourself forced to do your own hair and makeup on the set of Phat Girlz 2.

Perhaps even more depressing is the new ban on gay adoption that passed by 57% in Arkansas. I should acknowledge that this ban is not exclusively aimed at keeping gay people down. It also denies unmarried straight couples the right to adopt or be foster parents. So, at least people in Arkansas agree that the real problem here is not just that gay parents turn their kids gay or that all gay men are child molesters. It’s that kids turn out terribly when they’re not raised by two straight, married parents. And who can blame them? If yesterday’s election taught us anything, it’s that kids raised by single mothers never amount to anything.

I was thinking recently about some of my favorite infomercials, and one of the first that came to mind was Rejuvenique. You remember Rejuvenique, don’t you? It’s the flesh-toned mask that was supposed to firm up your flabby face by zapping the muscles eight times a second via a series of gold-plated “facial cushions.” While searching for that little gem on YouTube, I found a fairly large set of videos made entirely by people who like to wear realistic masks.

I’m pretty open minded, but if this kind of behavior doesn’t say “budding serial killer,” I don’t know what does. I’m not sure if it’s more or less creepy when the face has empty eye sockets. Apparently, in Japan, they know how to make a damn good-looking, realistic mask, which is equally unsettling.