Well, that was quite a week for a site that was just barely ready for it. But hey, it provided us with an unexpected way to introduce seaQwa [pronounce] to those who managed to find us.

Let's review, shall we? We'll introduce you to some of seaQwa's features along the way.

 

The Curtis Affair was introduced to me when I scanned a news search last Monday and saw this headline from The Columbian, Vancouver, WA's daily: "Curtis denies wrongdoing, says he is not gay".

At 6:42, I posted a digest of that story in Qnews as "'I am not gay,' insists Vancouver lawmaker as rumors swirl". But The Columbian story ledes by saying that Curtis was "caught up in a statewide media frenzy." I hadn't noticed the frenzy, so I had to go back to find what I'd missed: "Reports: Spokane police investigate attempted extortion of lawmaker by man he allegedly had sex with".

All last week, two of Spokane's three major TV stations did great jobs of covering the story. We picked up several stories from both KXLY and KREM. (KHQ was strangely complacent, rarely running more than an AP summary on their website. The town's paper, Spokesman-Review -- and KHQ's corporate cousin -- keeps most of its news stories under an expensive subscriber-only firewall, so it's had to know what they were doing, although a few of their stories made it onto the blog-cosmos.)

A Tuesday morning KXLY report provided Cody Castagna's name. We did a quick Google on the name and came up with his tasty set of images on gaypicsportal.com. (Savage appears to have done the same search and posted a link to the same gallery a few hours later on Slog.)

Now we had a hawt new face to go with the story -- and much more than just a face, in fact. KXLY and other outlets thought to check MySpace and came up with Cody's (we think of him now on a first-name basis) widely-used visor pic before the Castagna's profile was set to private.

 

Blog posts on the Curtis affair began to explode on Tuesday as word spread. I didn't have any way to keep up with that beyond the select (but very good) set of blogs that we track in our Qticker on the home page [also available with a little snippet on this page].

I again put on the web-dev hat that I'd been wearing for the past month to come up with a special way to keep track of all the stories -- many of which duplicated info that we already had in Qnews and so didn't belong in there. I did the DickAndCody page with a scrolling list of automatically updated blog posts and news stories about Curtis and Castagna. That was a one-off kind of thing -- unique to that situation, but it shows the kind of thing we'll be able to do with news stories that warrant it. Next time -- for the next media frenzy story -- we'll be ready with a tracker when the story breaks.

But even after Curtis's quick resignation from the Washington legislature, we haven't heard the end of this story. Our tracker is still catching a few new blog posts and news stories today. It's time now for some reflection on the case in day-after features. What does it mean? Why did it happen?

Prosecutors in Spokane will decide this week or next whether to press charges against both of the principles in the case. Curtis faces a possible misdemeanor soliciting charge. Castagna faces a more serious possible felony embezzlement charge.

Once that flurry fades, Curtis's name will probably also fade away while he privately tries to fix the goppy mess he's made for himself. Castagna? He faces a serious charge. He denies that he tried to extort Curtis for the money he said Curtis promised him. But the prosecutors will have to decide if the he said/he said nature of the situation deserves a trial. We'll get to replay (and we will, with those pictures) the wild night in Spokane if they do decide to press charges and don't get a quick plea.

We suspect, however, that if he plays his cards right (something he doesn't seem to have done often in the past), that Cody might be able to make something of all this. At least, the wide publicity that his pics have gotten should allow him to find a partner or two who would pay as well as Curtis reputedly promised to pay without demanding bareback.

 

As Savage put it:

Despite the best efforts of the religious right, it is now more shameful to be a lying, closeted, hypocritical closet case than to be an honest sex worker. Straight people get it, they understand. Curtis is the real problem here, not Castagna.

Castagna seems to have all the necessary physical attributes to make a good living for a few years. Being a sex-worker is a perfectly honorable profession if one doesn't -- as Cody seems to have done too often -- combine it with less savory kinds of hustling. He's sure to have received plenty of offers by now. Some of them are probably worth pursuing. Let's hope he picks the right ones, because, frankly, I'd love to see more of him. (See: I'm shallow. I can forgive the bad character and the limited language skills when it's all packaged the way he is.)

[[Update: 1:07 pm: While I was being a tour-guide-on-crutches to family visiting for the weekend, I missed an essential update from KXLY. Cody held an impromptu news conference Friday to  insist that he'd never before taken money for sex. Hattip: Queerty ]]

Another name from the affair that might crop up again is that of Hollywood Erotic Boutique. Unlike both Curtis -- an unknown legislator outside his district, and Castagna -- who had only his self-submitted amateur 'net porn pages to advertise himself, the shop where they met has been in the news before.

Last year, the owner of the "boutique" settled a long-running zoning dispute with the city over its business practices.

The owner of three of the shops has agreed to an order that would limit sales of adult material to no more than 20 percent of each store's floor area and to no more than 25 percent of their inventories. Any adult material would be partitioned from the rest of the business and access would be limited to adults only.

The shops would no longer advertise their "triple-X" merchandise but could use "mature products sold here" and describe their merchandise as being for "mature audiences," according to the decree.

Reports that Curtis had sex with a different man inside the shop before meeting Castagna and that he had visited the outlet previously have, no doubt, given it renewed attention by local authorities. We might just be hearing more about that place.

And, if we do hear more, we'll be sure to pass it along at seaQwa.com.

That's part of what we're about. But we also plan to return to the previous nature of this blog where it started. Once we've set down our web-dev hat at least briefly, we'll post about local Seattle events, issues, and people, just as we've been doing for the last two years at a different URL.

In the meantime, of course, Bill at GaySeattle.blogspot is doing a better job than we ever did at getting all those events at clubs and restaurants. His headlines with a direct link to the post at his great blog appear on our home page under the Qdo banner. (I just can't resist those Q's.)

Oh, and I'll call this site a "beta" for now because there's still more work to do on the "plumbing" of the thing, and until that's done, this blog -- Qblog -- won't get the attention (and posts) I hope to give it.