by Dan Savage
And that is why we banned D.J. from watching Suite Life—that and an episode where Zack drilled a hole in the wall so he could spy on girls using the bathroom. There are people who will be on sex-offender registries for the rest of their lives for doing exactly what Disney showed Zack doing.
Parental bans are not only ineffective—they’re counterproductive. I knew this from my own childhood. My father banned us kids from watching Three’s Company (too sexual) and listening to the music of Kiss (too satanic). So his children watched Three’s Company at houses of our friends and hid Kiss records in the jackets of Beach Boys albums. And D.J. continued to watch Suite Life—at the houses of his friends, and when his parents weren’t in the room monitoring his television viewing.
I cling to one hope. Despite my exposure to all those swishy gay men walking poodles on TV during my formative years, I grew up to be a different kind of gay. And despite the girl-crazy little boys D.J. saw on the Disney Channel, he seems to be growing up to be a different kind of straight. Maybe we’ll both wind up defying the stereotypes.
The only problem with that is fate. You can defy a stereotype. You can work against it. But stereotypes are patient. Sometimes they wait you out; they wear you down; they lull you into a false sense of security. And then—bam—one day you wake up and you’re the owner of a poodle.
When D.J. was five years old, he asked Santa for a poodle. And he didn’t want any poodle; he wanted a toy poodle. A poodle he planned to name Pierre.
I tried to stop it—selfishly, for my own sake—but I framed every argument as concern for D.J. We can’t do this to him, I told Terry. He’s already got gay parents, and I’m one of them. The cross he has to bear is big and pink enough already. Were we really going to nail a poodle to it too?
But D.J. was adamant. He had a friend, a boy with opposite-sex parents—straight parents—and his friend with the opposite-sex parents had a toy poodle. These people recruited my son. That’s what poodle people do. They lure you into the poodle lifestyle by targeting your children.
We did manage to talk D.J. into a less gay name for his poodle. Stinker has just one eye, is completely deaf, doesn’t come when you call him, and runs into walls and chairs and trees. And D.J. loves him.
I know all about Stinker’s habit of running into trees because I’m the one who somehow gets stuck walking the dog at night. We live on Capitol Hill, which is Seattle’s gay neighborhood. We live near a big park. Seattle’s cruisiest park. It’s called Volunteer Park, fittingly enough, as you can find a volunteer under every other bush. And you can find me there too, late at night, walking a poodle.
“It’s not my poodle,” I once wanted to scream at anyone who gave me a look. “It’s my son’s poodle. My straight son’s poodle. Not mine.”
But I’m used to Stinker now. I’ve adjusted. I’ve accepted myself as a gay man who owns a poodle; and like the fags in Barney Miller and The Choirboys, I proudly walk my poodle through a cruisy park late at night.
Family is ultimately a more powerful influence than television. Hopefully we can help D.J. adjust to girl-crazy, when his time comes, just as he helped me adjust to poodle ownership.
And just as D.J.’s father can walk a poodle around a cruisy park without being a total fag, I’m confident that one day D.J. will go girl-crazy without turning into a total Zack.
Or that’s what I tell myself anyway, when I’m walking D.J.’s poodle in the cruisy park late at night. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time now before Stinker runs headfirst into a tree that has a bare-assed cop handcuffed to it.
8. Folsom Prism Blues
Sally Kern is one of America’s lesser bigots.
There are a lot of bigoted Republican state legislators out there—and a few Democratic ones, too, but they seem to have the good sense to keep their mouths shut—so it takes real effort for a bigoted state legislator to rise to national attention. In the fall of 2012, for instance, America became acquainted with two bigoted Republican state legislators. Loy Mauch, a Republican member of the Arkansas State House of Representatives, asked in a letter to the editor in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, “If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it [in the Bible]?” (I got into no end of trouble with conservative Christians and Republicans when I pointed out the same thing—the Bible doesn’t condemn slavery. Quite the opposite: The Bible endorses slavery.) Terry England, a member of the Georgia State House of Representatives, compared women to farm animals during a floor debate about a bill that would have required women to carry all fetuses to term—even dead ones. “Life gives us many experiences,” England said during the debate. “I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive—delivering pigs, dead and alive.”
Sally Kern, a former schoolteacher, has been a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives since 2005. Kern first rose to national attention in March of 2008 when she said that homosexuality posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States. (“I honestly think [homosexuality] is the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam—which I think is a big threat…. It will destroy this nation!”) Kern made national news again in February of 2009 when she told a gathering of the John Birch Society—who knew those tinfoil asshats were still meeting?—that America needed a new “Great Awakening” to combat the homosexual menace. The gays have a secret plan to convince the world that homosexuality is a “superior lifestyle,” Kern warned the Birchers, and America needs to be on its guard against our nefarious themes:
You know, I’ve done a lot of reading on this. I wish I could describe to you their behavior. I will not because I would be redder than this suit…. This theme of equality and freedom is the approach that the homosexuals are using today—totally perverting the true intention of what our Constitution meant. The homosexuals get it—it’s a struggle between our religious freedoms and their right to do what they want to do.
Straight Americans would be “shocked and repelled” if they were exposed to the depraved things that gay Americans do—and Kern means gay male Americans (Kern doesn’t obsess about lesbians)—and if straight Americans don’t wake up and start fighting the gay agenda, Kern warned the Birchers, the gays will eventually convince the straights that the homosexual lifestyle is superior and pretty soon all Americans will be engaging in “depraved” gay behaviors.
My first impulse after reading Kern’s comments was to run home and take a picture of a plate of cookies that was sitting on my kitchen counter. That’s actually what I did: I got up from my desk, walked out of my office, jumped on my bike, rode home, and took a picture of a plate of peanut-butter cookies sitting on my kitchen counter. I baked the cookies myself the night before—from scratch, thank you very much—because baking is something I enjoy doing for my family. You could call it a “depraved behavior,” I suppose, if you consider carbs depraved, which many gay men do. The plan was to post the picture of the cookies on my blog and put this question to Kern: “Is this the kind of depraved behavior that you meant, Sally? Baking cookies for your family?”
Whenever a right-wing bigot like Kern starts dropping dark hints about all the top-secret, super-crazy sex stuff we gay people get up to when straight people aren’t watching, lots of gay people reflexively point to all the wholesome things we do. It’s a knee-jerk, defensive response. Kern says we’re all depraved perverts; gays and lesbians write blog posts and send tweets about PTA meetings and baking cookies and running errands for sick relatives: “We take care of our families; we pay our taxes; we bake cookies. What’s so depraved about that? We’re really not so different!”
But we are different.
Kern has a point. Gay men do tend to have more interesting sex lives than straight people do. There are lots of sexually adventurous straight people out there, of course, just as there are lots of sexually conservative gay people. (For the record: Not all sexually conservative people are repressed, just as not all sexually adventurous people are liberated.) But gay people are mor
e likely to be sexually adventurous than straight people. Yes, gay people bake cookies. Yes, gay people go to work and pay taxes and take care of our families. But let’s be honest: If we use Kern’s implied definition of “depraved”—she means “kinky”—then, yeah, gay men are generally more “depraved” than straight people. It’s not that gay men are any likelier to be kinky than straight men. We’re just likelier to be open about it. Telling your mom and dad you’re a cocksucker is hard. Telling your boyfriend you want to be spanked before you suck his cock? That’s easy.
And so long as a gay guy is safe and sane about his kinks, so long as he indulges in moderation and only with men who share his kinks, there’s no harm, no foul, and no depravity.
I didn’t post the picture of those cookies to my blog that day. Because even as I stood in my kitchen, hovering over the plate of cookies on the counter with my phone in hand, I knew that to post that picture was a mildly dishonest deflection and not an answer. Yes, I baked those cookies. Yes, baking peanut-butter cookies for your family is pretty damn wholesome. But the fact of the matter is my sex life would turn Kern’s face redder than the Republican-red dresses she favors.1 Even in our eighteenth year together—our fifteenth as parents—Terry and I still have a great sex life. We enjoy the kinds of “behaviors” that fascinate the Sally Kerns of this world. And while I could hide behind a plate of peanut-butter cookies, why should I have to? Our sex life is good and varied and keeps getting better. We meet each other’s needs, we indulge each other’s kinks, and we’re having a blast. All married couples should be so lucky.
I would share a few specific examples, but Terry doesn’t allow me to write about our sex life.
Back when we first met, Terry gave me a choice: I could write about my sex life or I could have sex with him. But I couldn’t write about my sex life and have sex with him. I choose sex with him. Terry does allow me to share a rough outline: We’re monogamish, meaning we’re mostly monogamous; we enjoy some run-of-the-mill kinks, nothing crazy, nothing dangerous (we never do anything that would endanger our bowel functions). One other detail Terry allows me to share: My husband looks good in leather.
My husband looks really good in leather.
I was actually looking at my husband decked out in leather when I suddenly remembered Kern’s comments to the John Birch Society months after she made them. We were standing in a hotel lobby in downtown Chicago, each with a vodka and Red Bull in hand, surrounded by thousands of other gay men wearing leather. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through the pictures until I found the one of the cookies.
Terry and I were attending International Mr. Leather (IML), an annual contest/beauty pageant/party for the gay leather/S&M/fetish crowd. The International Mr. Leather Contest, which has been held in Chicago every Memorial Day weekend since 1979, transforms its host hotel into the World’s Biggest Leather Bar. Terry looks good in leather—have I mentioned that my husband looks good in leather?—and I’ve always had an affinity for leather bars. After years of talking about going to IML, we finally decided to take the plunge a few years ago. We’ve been back three times.
The Kerns of the world point to IML as proof that gay people are too depraved for even basic civil rights protections, much less marriage and family life. But everywhere Terry and I went at IML that first year, we met guys who had been together for five, ten, twenty, and thirty years. Some of the gay couples we met at IML were there to look, some were there to play, and some, like us, left kids back home with grandparents for the weekend. Despite what Sally Kern would have you believe, there doesn’t seem to be anything mutually exclusive about conspicuous displays of wholesomeness (baking cookies) and conspicuous displays of depravity (attending an event like IML).
So perhaps instead of reflexively pointing to our homemade peanut-butter cookies when someone like Sally Kern levels a charge of sexual “depravity” against gay men, we should respond by pointing to our cookies and our occasional wild weekends. Gay people seem to have a much easier time reconciling love and lust, commitment and desire. We can have loving, stable relationships and our sexual adventures too. We can have homemade peanut-butter cookies and IML.
And maybe in that way—and only in that way—gay people are superior.
The International Mr. Leather Contest doesn’t just attract thousands of gay men from all over the world to Chicago every Memorial Day weekend. It also attracts a certain hater from the Chicago suburbs.
Peter LaBarbera is the founder of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), an anti-gay hate group based in Naperville, Illinois. AFTAH is “devoted exclusively to exposing and countering the homosexual activist agenda,” according to its website.
LaBarbera was a reporter at the Moonie-owned Washington Times in the early 1990s before leaving to work for Concerned Women for America and a handful of other anti-gay groups.
“Formed as a part-time venture in 1996 by long-time gay-basher Peter LaBarbera, who reorganized [AFTAH] in 2006 as a much more serious and influential, if often vicious, operation,” the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) wrote in 2010, when it placed AFTAH on its list of anti-gay hate groups. AFTAH, according to SPLC, repeats bogus claims like the notion that there is “a disproportionate incidence of pedophilia” among gay men, or that a proposed bill in California would “promote cross-dressing, sex-change operations, bisexuality and homosexuality to kindergartners.”
LaBarbera is best known in the gay community for “infiltrating” IML, an event that’s easily infiltrated, as it’s open to the public. (Even so, you have to pass through multiple screening checkpoints, produce ID to prove you’re over twenty-one, and sign a waiver before entering the Leather Market, where merchants sell gear, porn stars stroll around in jockstraps, and bondage and flogging demonstrations take place.) Once LaBarbera manages to get inside IML—which he does by walking through the doors—he takes pictures of gay men in fetish gear or nothing at all. LaBarbera posts his pictures to AFTAH’s website under warnings like, “Not for children! Graphic photos below with offensive depictions of real-life homosexual depravities!”
LaBarbera’s campaign to expose the “depravities” at IML—an effort that earned him the nickname “Porno Pete” from gay bloggers—can be charitably described as pointlessly redundant. Every year IML attendees post tens of thousands of pictures to their own blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and Instagram accounts. There’s also a massive photo archive on IML’s official website (www.imrl.com), where anyone with (1) an Internet connection; and (2) a passionate interest in “homosexual depravity” can view and download thousands of images of gay men in leather harnesses, dog collars, and rubber bodysuits.
If the gay men who attend IML are trying to keep their “homosexual depravity” secret, well, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it. (They’re doing about as lousy a job hiding their depravity as all those straight women reading Fifty Shades of Grey in public are doing hiding theirs.) And since no one has to attend IML to get his hands on pictures of all that homosexual depravity, there must be some other reason that LaBarbera feels compelled to sneak into IML and take pictures. I wonder what that reason could be.
Thinking…thinking…
I’m drawing a blank. Maybe a good reason will come to me before I finish this chapter.
AFTAH isn’t just content to photo-document the atrocities at IML year in, year out. LaBarbera has tried to shut IML down by issuing boycott threats against the small number of Chicago hotels large enough to host the event.
“Would you want to sleep in the same bed where a homosexual orgy—or drunken, orgiastic encounter between two ‘leathermen’—took place with body fluids and feces flying here and there? Neither would we,” LaBarbera wrote on AFTAH’s website in 2011. “Tell the Hyatt Regency Chicago that it is wrong and un-hygienic to profit off perversion-fests like IML.” (I don’t want to get too graphic here or anything, as this book is headed for the Library of Congress, but if feces is “flying here and there” when you have anal se
x, you’re doing it wrong. One doesn’t have anal sex with an ass full of shit for the same reason one doesn’t have oral sex with a mouth full of food—it’s uncomfortable and it makes a mess.)
LaBarbera’s anti-depravity crusade isn’t limited to IML. In January of 2009, AFTAH rallied its right-wing Christian followers behind an effort to shut down a kink-and-swinging gathering in Columbus, Ohio. LaBarbera conducted a phone harassment campaign targeting the host hotel for “Winter Wickedness.” AFTAH demanded that the hotel break its contract with the organizers and cancel the event.
“LaBarbera’s tongue hangs out as he details all of the various demos and activities slated for this weekend’s Winter Wickedness,” gay blogger Joe Jervis wrote about the controversy, “but he fails to mention the slight detail that this is an event primarily for heterosexuals.”
Why would LaBarbera and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality leave that little detail out of the “action alert” they sent to their anti-gay followers? Because Peter LaBarbera, like Sally Kern, wants people to believe that all gays are depraved perverts and all depraved perverts are gay.
Acknowledging the existence of kinky heterosexuals would complicate LaBarbera’s efforts to convince his already-convinced followers that gay people, and only gay people, are capable of sending bodily fluids and feces flying all over a hotel room. (Straight people have anal sex too; in real numbers, more straight people engage in anal intercourse than gay people.)
LaBarbera did not succeed in shutting down Winter Wickedness, although attendees did have to run a gauntlet of local TV news cameras to enter the hotel. And he didn’t succeed in fooling me with his “action alert” either. I knew right away that Winter Wickedness was a straight event. The hotel where it was taking place? The hotel LaBarbera was asking his followers to call?
