Michelle Shocked: If love were a train, it'd be derailed

Disappointing to see that Michelle Shocked has gone from the ugly dismissal of her own sexuality to a blanket attack on all gay people, live from the stage at Yoshi's, San Francisco. Matt Penfield was there, and told Yahoo Music:

"She started reading some tweets from the stream and having a dialogue about people's impressions, talking about how she was feeling brave at this point and that she was doing the right thing. Then the tone of the conversation became extremely religious and she began talking about the two things most important to her being Jesus Christ and freedom. Then she talked about how she had just come from a prayer meeting the night before, and the people in her prayer meeting were really worried because these are the end times, and they’re the end times because Prop. 8 is going to lead to ministers marrying gay people with a rifle to the head. At which people got a little riled up; then there started to be some call and response from the crowd about what she meant. She started exhorting the crowd very specifically to go ahead and tweet or write and say that Michelle Shocked says God hates f--s, and some other references to the Bible denouncing homosexuality as sinful and abhorrent.

"At that point a lot of people started getting up and walking out. We didn’t understand if this was for the sake of art or an actual rant. Then she delivered the same Bible verses in Spanish. At that point personally I felt like I was an emotional hostage, and the night of entertainment had become a night for her to deliver this intense personal polemic that, in hindsight, it felt like she had been carrying around since she got on stage, while we were strapped in waiting for her to deliver it."

There's been a few vain attempts to suggest that maybe this was some sort of biting satire, but taken alongside her past description of homosexuality as being "no more of a sin than fornication" (gee, thanks) and her same-sex past either as a lie or an "inconvenient truth" it seems unlikely.

Last night Shocked was retweeting a mix of positive and negative @ messages, prompting one exasperated follower to sigh "the cryptic retweets aren't helping".

What's certain, though, is that the world is treating a former radical standing on stage shouting "god hates fags" - however ironically - like box office poison, with shows being axed all over America.

Michelle Shocked. Come a long fucking way indeed.