Adam Lambert performed at the Hobby Center in Houston on Wednesday night. Not that you would know it from Brandon K. Hernsberger's insane review of the show in the Houston Press.

It starts with the line, "It doesn't matter if Adam Lambert is gay," and then launches into a diatribe that reduces Lambert to nothing more than gay. Along the way, Hernsberger gets basic facts about Lambert wrong. He opines that Lambert is talentless, and does nothing to back that claim up. And in the end, this reader was left with his jaw dropped, wondering when a more homophobic piece of writing last made it into a weekly newspaper.

Oh yes, it's also SO POORLY WRITTEN one is left wondering how a person like this managed to get a job at Houston's top alternative paper.

"Adam Lambert, Nyquil made of skin shaped like a black light with a glued-on wig made of spiky black sanctimony," Harnsberger writes, early on in this mess. Mixed metaphors and poor imagery aside, what on earth does this mean? Adam has skin like a black light? And the writer's concerned that our SOCIETY may be othering him?

But on to the more obvious homophobia. Hernsberger believes that the only reason Lambert is a star is because he is gay. He wouldn't have made it through the door on American Idol otherwise, Hernsberger says, ignoring the fact that Lambert didn't come out until after the show. He goes on to claim that people voted for Lambert out of a sense of guilt, but only enough to take second place because first place would be too much to give a gay person.

Wow, we're powerful people, we Americans, aren't we?

The author goes on to explain that the audience "slinks and turns away as if these acts are unacceptable at shows featuring our idol" when Adam kisses a male musician on stage, because, as he says, "Adam Lambert makes people believe things they know they don't believe, and for an hour and a half Wednesday night we all got to play pretend."

This is odd and hard to believe. The audience, acting as one somehow, slinks away? But not the author, of course. He's there to watch, and tell us about it. Brave man.

Apparently, our society, and by extension the entire audience at the Adam Lambert concert, is straight. Because why would gay people slink away?

This is called heterosexism. But why should we look at the author's homophobia, when he's doing such a boffo job of exposing our own? After all, he was at the gay guy's concert.

Along with writing novels, I teach writing at Arizona State University. This concert review would get an F among my freshmen, simply because it fails on so many levels. I teach my kids that no argument can survive without "conditions of rebuttal." This means that we must anticipate the views of those who might disagree with us, and rebut them. In Hernsberger's case, that would include the millions of people worldwide who think Lambert has an incredible voice and is a dynamic performer. A solid review would need to nod to these people, and then argue against their view. For example, one might say "enough people consider Adam talented for him to have a platinum album, but at this concert, he sounded off key and shrill."

But this reviewer opted to ignore these people, just as he ignores the concert as if it was somehow beneath him. And we see, from Hernsberger's writing, that he might simply be too cool and talented to waste his time reviewing such tripe as a platinum artist like Lambert.

The last line: "What's the difference between an Adam Lambert concert and a third-grade talent show? You get free sno-cones at one."

Would the Houston Press have allowed a white writer to review a Beyonce concert, and come back with nothing beyond a piece about how the "audience" was only there to feel better about liking a black artist?

Shame on the Houston Press for allowing this sort of blatant homophobia in their pages.