In the Way

 

I still remember my first. At a party, beautiful Victorian house in San Francisco. Nice. We were celebrating the completion of our training course for an AIDS support network. The hosts were muckety-mucks, thus the restored “painted lady” on the park. They were lovely, by the way. There was dancing. At some point fairly late in the evening one of them took over the record player and put on some obscure minor disco single. This was the eighties so all us Acting Up queer babies were slightly mortified by the throwback. But then our host, obviously ill himself, proceeded to dance down the house, mama. He was glorious. We cheered. And then me and my friend Joe were invited out to the deck for a splash in the hot tub.

Mostly what I remember was undressing in the cold and feeling doughy and pale compared to the rest of the crew. Also? I think Joe kept his underwear on which was disappointing and odd and rather touching. Really the whole thing was terribly exciting (I’d never been in a hot tub let alone with naked men,) and in retrospect, perfectly innocent but for the booze and the pot. Sweet really. 

Not knowing quite what to do, I talked. Default setting. Chat? Hardly the point but play to your strengths, baby Bradley. Yes, like everyone else in the surprisingly generous tub I was trying to see Joe’s junk through the bubbles, but what I did was quiz the man to my left about his this that and everything. Pretty sure I did not make a good impression. Handsome man, in his forties, mustache, impressive erection, probably not looking for an active listener. At some point — and do not ask me when or how as I have clearly suppressed what I could of that conversation — he told me he was a Republican.

And that’s pretty much the end of my hot tub orgy story. Joe had a boyfriend, I went home to the beloved husband, nobody could find enough towels so I remember being damp and shivering the whole way home on the M car.

Now, is it possible that someone else in the tub overlooked that man’s moral deficiency for the sake of his impressive member? Sure. But the silence I remember was real. Nobody shouted. Nobody stormed off. The air just went out of everything, for me at least and then I went home. I don’t know that I said a thing other than to ask if he was joking. He wasn’t. 

Before we even moved to San Francisco I’d had a similar shock. A college friend (I was briefly in college then) insisted on meeting Allen, who at the time was my hot new boyfriend. It went well. Allen was and is a very good first impression. After, my friend rather than Allen gave me a ride home. Don’t remember why. I didn’t drive. Anyway as soon as we got in my friend’s car he turned on me.

“WHY didn’t you warn me?!” 

?!?!?!

“You might have mentioned that Allen’s black!” 

And — scene. 

Actually I was so stunned by both the anger and the cause that I don’t know that I did much to defend myself or call my friend out for his racist bullshit, because darling, that is what that was. I loved the guy, we’d been through a lot together, young as we were. Eventually we had a proper talk, but I never looked at my friend quite the same way ever again. When he died I missed him, but I cannot think of him to this day without hearing that “WHY”.

Years later in Seattle I met a gay author whose first book had just been published. Had an event at the bookstore. The book was excellent. He was handsome and charming. I drew him and he was amused and signed the drawing. Success. This was before the full triumph of social media, but we stayed in touch. I learned something of his history over time and when his much older partner died, I expressed my sincere sympathy. Later I found an obituary online. Republican. Washington insider and minor big deal in the Conservative Movement. Closeted, obviously, though not entirely. I seem to remember the partner’s name in the obit.

Weird, right? I mean it’s not just me, it is genuinely weird that these fuckers still exist, isn’t it? Back in the day, there was always the strong possibility that one was a Republican from birth. I still have friends like this. It was like being Baptist or bow legged; not your fault really, just genes and generational loyalty. Maybe an inadequate diet? 

And then there were those sad sack simps in the Log Cabin Republicans. Remember? Jesus, what a pitiable collective of masochists and mental deficients. Year after year, election cycle after election cycle that tatterdemalion little troop would suck up to one minor candidate or another, just hoping their new Daddy wouldn’t, in the end, take their money and then kick the shit out of them like their last Daddy did. We laughed at them, those white socks with suits gays, like flat-earthers and the queens who couldn’t let Donna Summer or Gloria Gaynor go when those girls told us straight up that we were dancing straight down to Hell.

The mugs I’ve included above belong to some of the gay Republicans profiled in the NYT yesterday. These men are part of the Trump administration. They are none of them your old school, fringe fags. These bitches are all right in the thick of it, and they evidently represent a statistically significant sample of this new, out and openly fascist faggotry who think Donald has always been perfectly cool to their boyfriends, that trans and nonbinary people are, I don’t know, —  not us? — and that it’s actually cool to collaborate.

But then they aren’t actually anything new, are they? Ernst Rohm had a boyfriend until his comrades killed them both. Gay Mike White’s gay dad wrote sermons for Jerry Falwell. That Quisling in pearls, Tim Miller now sits on CNN like a legit person despite having quite the past as a proudly poisonous Breitbart toady. The old gay chant, “we are everywhere” could not have been more true. 

So what’s so different this time? What rates the New York Times profile?

Everything is different now, surely? (And please feel free to call me Shirley.) There has never been anything like Donald Trump in the whole history of the Republic. (In the history of the world however his type has always been common as muck.) This isn’t peril. This is present danger. This administration sent a gay makeup artist to be raped and beaten in a foreign prison. They kicked out serving LGBTQIA military and banned medical care for trans people and and and and and — none of that matters to these gay men. None of it. In the old days, the Log Cabin Losers would all have made sad-face while jawing on about “change from within.” Not these boys. Laugh? Why they nearly died. SUCH fun, such parties. 

(Not a lesbian in the mix? Did I miss one?)

These white men are having the time of their lives. And all the “leftist gays” who pick on them in DC bars and swipe left whenever they learn that Dick works for Don? Well, these gay Republicans will just throw their own party, thank you and so what if the cater-waiters spit in all their drinks? Maybe they dig that.

I used to think that we should collectively and consistently shun these assholes. The minute you learn that some queer is queer for the GOP? No drinks, no dick, no quarter. At one time that felt pretty harsh. I had friends back in the day who would have disagreed and argued for engagement and talked sympathetically about other people’s “journeys.” 

But all these men are out. This is the post Lindsey Lilly Graham generation. Out, proud, and absolute pricks. Not one has the conscience science would assign to a flea. Not one could be made to give a single shit about anyone literally, actually, in any way unlike themselves. They all willingly agreed to pose for the national paper of record as poster boys for queer political cuckoldry: they like to watch the rest of us get fucked.

So maybe the whole idea of just shunning these people is kind of quaint now. Maybe we need to try something different. After all, how can you shun someone without shame? 

I’m never going to advocate violence. I don’t know that I’m capable myself and I don’t want anyone going to jail for wasting a slap on all of that Botox and lip fillers because who knows if these queens would even feel it anyway.

What I will suggest is that maybe it’s time we stop being polite and start getting real with these men (generational Easter egg.) don’t shout next time. Don’t scream at them in restaurants or try to throw them out of bars. Maybe just go Gandhian. 

Stand. Stand right in front of them. Everywhere they go. Wherever they are. Don’t let them just go about their business. Don’t molest or harass them, but don’t let them pass. Let everyone know who they are and what they are doing. We may not be able to stop them collaborating with the enemies of progress, but there are enough of us, we are the overwhelming majority after all, so perhaps it’s time impede their physical progress through the world. Stand in their way. At the gym. In the street. At a bar. When they visit their awful mothers or meet their despicable fathers at the golf club, stand in their way. Make them see us. Make them try to get around us. Make them, if just for a moment, stop. 

At the Kennedy Center, stop him.

At the dry cleaners, stop him.

On the steps of congress, at the gate of the White House, when he gets out his keys to go get in his car, when he tries to hit on your friend, or buy you a drink, or get to his flight — stop him. 

Don’t be rude. Don’t be violent. Just be in their way.

That is after all what we are. We are in the way. Decency, civility, kindness, altruism, democracy, all just obstacles to these men. 

Be an obstacle. 

Get in their way.

Remind them that the path to power is not always open, that what they expect need not always be straight ahead, that in the end we will not be moved.

Fight.

Harm

 “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” 

What good? Surely that’s the question. 

Another ghoulish pervert has just gone down to dusty death. Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is dead. Took his sweet time, but at least he’s dead. Best thing for everyone. Not a moment too soon. Really the only reason to regret his passing would be if it in any way ended his suffering or that of his family and friends. Almost worth it to bring him back if it would keep that going.

He was an evil-minded, ignorant, hateful, harmful bigot and he devoted his adult life not as he would doubtless tell you “to Christ,” but to the persecution of innocents, the perversion of scripture, the promotion of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and in a relentless pursuit of influence and power. He deformed every tenant of his profession — psychology not theology by the way, not that he made any such distinction — and used his credentials as cudgels with which to brutalize at least two generations. 

He actively promoted beating children. He absolutely believed women were inferior to men and all men inferior to lipless white Southern Christian crackers like himself. 

He spoke not to or with his God but for Him, all but as Him. This is what God wants, as divinely revealed in scripture to — wait for it, Dr James Dobson Jr. Lil’ Jimmie Lee knows just what He likes. More often though, this is what He hates, and so should you.

He craved celebrity and political influence and was one of the leading architects of the submission of the Republican Party to the fanaticism of the Christian Pharisees and the unrepentant Confederacy. 

He created and promoted much of the material used in conversion therapy and homophobic reeducation camps, collected and spent millions of dollars to deny and repeal gay and women’s rights legislation, and used his considerable influence within his evangelical community to turn them from witness and charity to far right activism and violence.

He was yet another mild white monster in an ugly suit and a bad haircut who hardly ever raised his voice even as he lowered the morality of his time and ruined countless lives in the name of Gawd and James Dobson.

If anybody reading this should wonder why so many of us of a certain age have been on social media celebrating his death, let me just remind those of our friends untouched by his dry, icy influence that this is one of the many who put us here, where we are today. If the world is more hateful, it’s because of Dr. James Dobson Jr. and men just like him.

I wish I believed in Hell, if just to see him in it.

May his memory bring the shame it deserves and all his words, works, and deeds follow him down to the grave and be forgotten.

The Triumph of the Yahoos

This is a book.

Recently read a long piece by the chief political analyst for The New York Times. In it he reviews all the data that is finally all in from the last election. I’ll summarize: she would have lost even if everyone who didn’t vote had voted. You know the refrain: “We show up, we win” etc.? All the versions of “Just VOTE!”? Turns out that’s not true anymore. Not this time. We didn’t just lose. He won. Put that the other way ‘round because it is worse, he would have won not despite the numbers but because. Because we chose him. Not just those people, not just the red hats and necks: people of color, white suburban women, Pennsylvanians, Lithuanians and philatelists and dishwashers and Star Bellied Sneetches— you name ‘em, we picked him. Turns out we were wrong this time about the whole “just show up” idea of the liberal majority. Even when we didn’t vote for other Republicans? We voted for him. Even if every registered whatever had shown up? He won. Because we like him. The majority of voters, the majority of Americans genuinely like the vibe. White people mostly, overwhelmingly, but not exclusively plus, you know, Cubans. We dig the WTF of it all. We love Trump. 

Who now?! Who does?! How?! Who could look at him, at this gibbering, yam-tittied, moron and think, “Yeah, gimme some more o’ that! Four more years, daddy!”?

Be honest, you know who.

Not talking about his faithful. Not MAGA, or not just MAGA. This is not just about them, just as this time it isn’t only about the religious right, the isolationists, or the defense hawks. It’s not just about the billionaires and the tax cheats, or that ghastly crowd at Bezos’ rented Venice nuptials, where Popeye the human thumb got hitched to a flotation device.

This isn’t just about the racists, and the fanatics,  or corrupt elites or the power mad or the greedy or the cruel. Like they themselves so cynically say of the poor, the genuinely evil are indeed always with us, but it’s not always about the villains even when it is clearly nothing to do with heroes.

Nope. We know the bad guys here. No secret. They are all black hat, guns blazing, maniacal laughter in front of helpless captives — they are the enemy we know. Right? They hate us, we hate them, supposedly there’s an equilibrium. We support X they support Y. Blah blah blah. As a species we progress and regress. Blah blah blah. Maybe we don’t blow it all up. Fingers crossed. Pendulum swings and balance and the drift of history? Blah blah blah.

No more.

Remember, not just those people this time. The majority, and again by a pretty long chalk.

I know it wasn’t me, or you if you’re reading this, so who was it then?

Who? Who was it? Whose fault is this?

You know. Be honest. Don’t play dumb.

It’s simple. It’s so simple it’s stupid. It’s STUPID, people. 

It is stupid people.

Turns out it is not the economy, not the price of eggs, not those pesky agendas; gay, liberal, reactionary, religious, or the control of the courts or borders or women’s bodies or trans rights. It’s not the failure of the Democratic coalition or the success of conservative media. 

Now admittedly, you listen to Joe Rogan or Theo Von, you are fucking stupid. Not just wrong, ill -informed, or naughty, fucking stupid. Every bit as stupid as your grandma forest-bathing in Fox News, volume all the way up,  24/7. Because who does that?!

You know. Just admit it.

It’s stupid people. 

Stupidity is what’s wrong with us. Who knew?!

Not us, evidently. Or we would rather not say. We were raised better. Maybe that’s the problem. We don’t want to act like that. They go low, we go disdainfully quiet. (That’ll show ‘em. The fascists have always had such an ear for irony.)

And we don’t want to say that word, “stupid.” It ain’t nice. It’s judgmental and archaic and historically misapplied to populations educationally disadvantaged, misdiagnosed, oppressed. Besides, what does it help, calling people a word like that? 

Yes, people make what we consider stupid choices, we make stupid choices. Stupidity is one of the great levelers, yes?

But my oh my, my dears there is a lot of it about these days, isn’t there? So very much more stupidity than is normally expected, wouldn’t you say? And so bold! Shameless. For heaven’s sake it is all over the map, isn’t it? All over the airwaves and the internet, painted and proudly displayed on every available surface from the town square both virtual and real, to brimming over in the White House, and Congress, pouring out of the State Houses, spreading across the lawn, out in these streets, and up the creek. Stupidity in the amen corner, stupidity all over the floor. Right next door, don’t you know. Hell, the call may be coming from inside the house.

Shocking. That’s the word for it. Embarrassing. Like I said, we are all capable, culpable. No wonder we hesitate to call it out. 

But there it is. There they are, are they not? So maybe it’s time to stop calling shovels potentially dangerous if otherwise useful, usually large hand tools for breaking and moving earth, no? Spade-a-spade-time.

Because it turns out there are a lot of stupid people who made this colossally stupid choice willingly, proudly, publicly, and with or without hesitation fucked us all not in any good way.

Margaret Atwood said, “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” The results are in and it is really bad, ain’t it? Yeah.

Kind of a breakthrough. One of those historical pivot points, almost a revolution in stupidity.

I mean here we are, finally moving beyond the traditional definitions of left and right, rural and urban, crossing educational levels, and religious and secular differences, and even — at last — the question of race! Yeah! Because if you didn’t notice, despite the constant stream of regret clips, and profiles of deported Trump voters, and follow-ups on his Arab supports in Detroit, etc., there are stupid humans, stupid Americans of every race, creed, and color. Huzzah!

That’s right, Right. We have finally achieved the fantasy of a colorblind, absolutely equal society — if only in this one complete fucked up way. 

The single most well represented population in the last election, the majority whose will is now being expressed by every shitty, greedy, short-sighted, destructive, arbitrary and false move of this corrupt and venal new regime? The stupid.

You thought they would only arrest the “bad” immigrants? No, you weren’t so much misled as you are just fucking stupid. 

You didn’t think that after they destroy transgender rights that they’d come after marriage equality? Why would you think that? Oh, that’s right, stupid and gay! Could happen to anyone, gurl.

You didn’t think the Trump-rigged majority on the Supreme Court would actually let them dismantle the media, congressional oversight, separation of church and state? What’s left of the Voting Rights Act? Oh I see the problem. You’re fucking stupid.

You didn’t think they’d actually cancel your health coverage and kick your disabled son off Medicaid? That they were only going to go after fraud and cheaters? Yeah, you thought that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary because you’re fucking stupid. 

The federal government was just wasteful and full of lazy bureaucrats and — of, fuck it, you’re just fucking stupid. 

This isn’t an ideological debate. Nobody’s winning here. If you’re posting videos dancing in your flag panties and cheering for ICE, you’re contemptible. If you can’t stop saying you didn’t think it would go so far so fast, well you’re every bit as stupid as those Yahoos. In fact, you’re worse in a way, because we don’t expect much from my people of origin, the rednecks and the dentally challenged, them gals still sporting curly perms and them fellers in bibs. (Look at me. If you’re unfamiliar, bibs, beard, missing teeth… without the glasses I’d pass for a Trump-lovin’ beer-soaked corn hole player, without books, I look just exactly like my fellow Saltine Americans.) 

If you voted for him, you are no better than that hooty trash on TikTok. Simple. Don’t flatter yourselves that your boots and hands are clean. You voted for Trump, you’re trash, you stupid motherfucker. (And yeah, we talk like this everywhere but church and car shows.) Welcome to the Yahoos.

Who are the Yahoos, you ask? Gulliver’s Travels? Jonathan Swift?

Spoiler alert: the Yahoos are us. 

They are not in the cartoons and animation and the adaptations for children, the Yahoos. Lilliput and Brobdingnag — the little people and the large — that’s as far as most adaptations go, as far as most of us remember. Nowhere near the whole story, and the story, remember, isn’t the point, (or shouldn’t be after nine or ten.) Satirist, Swift, not a children’s author. (Remember his suggestion of what to do with all those hungry babies? Eat ‘em. Again, with all the stupidity around, I’d better mention: satire.)

The author didn’t really kick all our asses until after Gulliver goes to Japan. (That’s right, he goes to Japan. Also not in the classic comics I should think.) Swift saves a good part of his shot until we meet the beautiful, articulate, philosophical horses, the Houyhnhnms, and the two-footed beasts who serve and plague them.

Traditionally the illustrators of Swift’s immortal classic have tended not just to the literal but to the frankly racist when it’s come to drawing the Yahoos. When Lemuel Gulliver is confronted by them in the Fourth Book, the Yahoos are naked, hairy, filthy, violent. They fight over shiny stones. They bite.

 So… us. Us, unwashed, uncombed, naked, howling — reality tv us, monster truck rally us, Trump rally us, angry mob, warring, thieving, raping, us — without pants, dentistry, deodorant, shame.

The Yahoos could not provide a greater contrast to the truly noble Houyhnhnms:

“I know not whether it may be worth observing that the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language to express anything that is evil, except what they borrow from the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos.”

That’s the point of them, the Yahoos, if anyone’s missed it, that contrast, that supposedly absurd inversion. 

“For who can read of the virtues I have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing animal of his country?”

Reasoning? Governing? Indeed, not so much anymore. Unfashionable. One might say, un-American, anti-Yahoo.

Swift, an Irish clergyman, had been in the very center of politics, power, and literary London, but when the government he supported fell, he returned to Ireland, an exile in his own country, a bitter, disappointed man. Such he was when he wrote his masterpiece: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. 

It is one of the highest achievements in English comic writing and an absolute abattoir of human pretensions, and nowhere does the bald, bitter Dean of St. Patrick’s wield his wit with deadlier brutality than in his portrait of the Yahoos.

Reminder: us.

And should it still need saying, he knew whereof he wrote: 

“Therefore since money alone was able to perform all these feats, our Yahoos thought they could never have enough of it to spend or to save, as they found themselves inclined from their natural bent either to profusion or avarice. That the rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man’s labour, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former. That the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages, to make a few live plentifully.”

And here:

“… they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning; and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind, in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession.”

Us. 

Fellow Yahoos, you will I hope forgive me for mixing my satires when I say, while all animals are equal, some are indeed more equal than others, and we are at this moment witnessing yet again the Triumph of the Yahoos.

The worst of us have won, not for want of resistance, but because it would seem too many of us are simply too stupid to notice any difference, or care about consequences, or because we genuinely enjoy being bestial and cruel.

I think it time we stop insisting that somewhere there is some sense of the noble Houyhnhnms in even the most obvious, grubby, ignorant asses all around us; some lingering, redeemable humanity in even the worst Yahoos. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. 

Time though we called a spade a spade, and hit these Yahoos with it right in their smug, ugly faces, at least metaphorically. 

When that pumpkin spice would-be dictator lies and babbles and talks like just exactly the Yahoo he is, time the media and the rest of us stop trying to make sense of his word salads. He’s stupid. He says stupid shit. All there is to it.

My neighbor who thought illegal immigration was just “getting out of hand,” presumably right here in almost perfectly lily white West Seattle? Well, that’s stupid. Shut up, Karl, you’re embarrassing yourself. You sound like a Yahoo.

If you voted for Trump because “something needed to change”? shut the fuck up, Yahoo. You are too stupid to express an opinion in public. Your people, if they aren’t all as fucking stupid as you are, need to take you back inside and keep you there.

Grandma thinks “the transsexuals” are — doesn’t matter what she thinks or why. Shut the fuck up, old Yahoo. Whatever you were going to say was going to be hateful, and stupid. Nobody wants to hear that shit. Sit your old ass down and shut your slack mouth.

Your priest said what?!

Yahoo. Fuck ‘im.

Your Dad said what?

Yahoo. Tell him to shut the fuck up.

That dude said what in your Uber?!

Yahoo. Let him walk.

If this doesn’t seem much of a solution, perhaps it isn’t meant to be. So, what is this? This is a refusal, not self-reflection. Fuck self reflection. Not in a meditative mood. Could be studying the example of better animals, but right now?

I want to bite someone. 

I want to howl. 

Yahooooooooo!!!!!

You