This letter was in the Gazette this morning:
HEALING TIME
Bookstores made right move by not hosting Jones
I would like to thank the bookstores in Colorado Springs that are not holding a book signing for Mike Jones’ new book, and I would like to ask the owner of Poor Richards, Richard Skorman, to decline as well (“City turns its back on tell-all book tour,” The Gazette, June 3). We at New Life Church are finally receiving some healing in our church and families, and this would have just taken us back to the beginning and opened many wounds that have finally closed.
While I understand that Jones is not doing well financially, couldn’t he have just gotten a job instead of capitalizing on the fall and failure of a man? Surely, in a city the size of Denver and with the diversity of people owning businesses there, there is someone who would be willing to hire him.
His words say it all: he’s doing it for the money. In my experience, when people do things for the money, they will say and do anything, whether it is true or not. I hope the book is filed under “fiction.”
Monica Bryant
Colorado Springs
I just got done reading Mike Jones' hideously written tell-all. The sex scenes are boring, unrevealing and unsurprising. There are, as other revieweres have noted, some touching moments about Mike Jones' family and upbringing, and I definitely walked away from it feeling a lot more sorry for Ted, who really does seem tragic in the end and, duh, gay.
That said, New Life Church embraced Jones as a truthteller and, as much as its parishioners like Monica Bryant may want to let the wounds heal, the damage that Ted and homophobic evangelicals like him and Dobson et. al. have done to queers around the world is immeasurable and I can assure you those wounds won't be healing anytime soon. That you all had to suffer a small taste of what it's like seemed just, though the lessons of it seem lost on you entirely. So maybe you need it rubbed in your face a couple more times after all?
As much as I don't like Jones' book or what comes across at times as an almost pathological vanity (no more than Ted's, though, I'm afraid), I still admire his courage and I'm still glad he did what he did and this community trying to censor him by denying him an opportunity to make an appearance on a legit book tour just goes to show how deep the denial still runs. Yeah, he did it for the money and he should get paid for it because he has a legitimate and important story to tell about the deeply insidious ramfications of our culture's homophobia. And he did it because it was the right thing to do even if it is poorly written (blame his ghost writer!). Let him come here and read from his crappy book. I hope Poor Richard's does invite him, and I'll certainly be there if he does.
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