Skipping Towards Gomorrah

by Dan Savage

  Perhaps it’s time for gay parades to come out of the closet. Gay people should admit that the pride parade is about pleasure, period. There’s even a model for this new, honest, gays-just-want-to-have-fun parade. What is Mardi Gras in New Orleans but a huge, outrageous heterosexual pride parade? No one pretends Mardi Gras is anything but a party; Mardi Gras is streets packed with straight people in outrageous costumes abusing drugs and alcohol and shoving their sexuality in all of our faces. If gays and lesbians could stop tarting up a good time in the drag of good intentions, our annual parade wouldn’t be an occasion for heterosexuals to grump at us about dykes on bikes, men in drag, and boys on leashes. If we dropped pride and politics from it and let the parade be a parade, people like Bill O’Reilly wouldn’t be able to bitch about it. Right now, gay people tell Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the straights that the parade is about political liberation and gay youth and gay marriage and civil rights and equality under the law. But when O’Reilly turns on the TV, all he sees are men walking in lime-green thongs, men in drag, and dykes on bikes. Of course O’Reilly’s offended—he’s been lied to. Remember, it’s not the sex that bothers O’Reilly, it’s the lying about the sex.

  So let’s stop lying about it. Gay pride parades aren’t about liberation anymore. We’re liberated already. I know, I know—we haven’t achieved full equality yet, but that’s not stopping us from living our lives openly, honestly, and pursuing happiness like maniacs. Since being openly gay is about striving to live a happy, fulfilled, sexually complete life (with some integrity), fun and pleasure are a natural part of the parade. So let’s be honest. Gay people should stop telling reporters and TV newscasters that the parade is about gay youth or gay marriage or gay rights or a protesting gay equality and then show up at the parade in lime-green thongs, take ecstasy, dance, make out, hook up, and take some more ecstasy. So long as we do that, the religious right will be there with their video cameras, ready to expose our hypocrisy. “They said it was a parade about gay rights and look at this video! These men are dancing with their shirts off!”

  When you suggest this to most gay people—drop the politics from the parade, drop “pride,” drop “gay is good”—they insist that the parade can’t change. After all, what about the gay kids? What about the newly out? What about gays and lesbians struggling with shame? Those people still need messages of pride, we’re told. (Never mind that very few closeted kids and newly out folks actually attend pride parades.) But kids and the newly out would be just as well served, if not better served, by a parade stripped of both pride and politics. What most newly out gay people take away from their first pride parade—the thing that helps alleviate their shame—isn’t anything they hear during the rallies or any of the flyers they’re handed. What’s important, what moves them, and what matters most, young gay people say, is not what they were told about being gay but what they saw: Gay people, all different kinds, all of them out and happy to be gay and having fun. That’s the most transformative part of a pride parade for the young and the newly out, and that part would grow stronger in an honest gay parade, one that dropped the inch-deep claims about political liberation. Again, everything that gay pride parades supposedly accomplish now for young gay people could be accomplished by a parade that didn’t have an easily exposed lie at its core.

  For as long as we attempt to pass our Mardi Gras off as social work, the homophobes with their video cameras will go on exposing the gulf between our goody-goody rationalizations and what actually goes on at pride parades. So let’s stop making excuses, let’s drop the rationalizations. The gay parade is a good time, and that’s enough. We shouldn’t have to make excuses for our good time any more than straight people should have to make excuses for Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is Mardi Gras. It’s booze and drugs and sex and costumes, it’s packs of young men shouting “Show us your tits!” at young women, and it’s packs of young women shouting “Show us your dick!” at young men. It’s a good time, period.

  There are straight people who don’t enjoy Mardi Gras. It’s hard to imagine our current First Lady, for instance, showing her tits to her husband, much less a crowd of men throwing plastic beads. No one claims that Mardi Gras represents the political aspirations of all straight Americans, and no one who made such an absurd claim would be taken seriously. But straight Americans are told by gay Americans that the gay pride parade represents the political aspirations of all gay people everywhere, and straight people, in their ignorance, take the claim seriously. So long as there’s a disconnect between what we’re telling them the pride parade is about and what the pride parade is actually about, people like Bill O’Reilly are going to be offended.

  “But the liberty to pursue happiness means that each of us pursues whatever it is he may desire,” Robert Bork grouses in Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Note the but at the beginning of that sentence. The liberty to pursue happiness and the things that we desire is not, in Bork’s opinion, a good thing. It requires a but, it’s problematic. “We are to move away from restraints in pursuit of we know not what,” writes Bork. “Such a person leads a precarious existence.”

  Kevin and Jake pursue happiness with an athleticism that I admire but couldn’t keep up with. But there’s nothing precarious about Kevin and Jake’s existence. They’ve moved away from restraint in pursuit of they know precisely what: sex, love, pleasure. Kevin and Jake know what they want, they know what makes them happy, and they go for it. They certainly were ethical sinners: they shared with their friends, they were courteous to strangers, and they offered me, a stranger with a notebook, their hospitality. In no way were they reckless about indulging themselves. Knowing that drugs were on the day’s agenda, Kevin and Jake loaded up on orange juice in the morning; when they got home late Sunday night, they downed protein shakes, took vitamins, and rested up. Recreational drugs are hard on the system, it’s true, just as bacon and bourbon and bungee jumping are. If something that’s hard on the system makes you happy, well, then you have to take special care of your system before and after you indulge. But from the outside looking in, Bork can’t see the care or the restraint in Kevin’s and Jake’s use and abuse of drugs, sex, and each other. He only sees two self-indulgent men in hot pursuit of things that wouldn’t make Bork himself happy.

  “There is no reason whatever why a community should not decide that there are moral and aesthetic pollutions it wishes to prohibit,” writes Bork, who would doubtless prohibit Los Angeles’s gay pride parade, with its thongs and overt sexual themes. Indeed, Bork supports the enforcement of antigay sodomy laws. (These laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1986 but, Bork complains, by an insufficiently wide margin!) Bork is all about the political indulgence of the puritanical impulse: Your pleasures aren’t my pleasures, therefore your pleasures are “moral pollutions.” I don’t approve of the places your pursuit of happiness takes you, so there ought to be a law that prevents you from going there. . . .

  Bork is free to disapprove and judge and condemn and write and go on TV and rant and rave. Anyone who thinks pride parades and green thongs and ecstasy are awful is free to talk gay men out of them. Unlike some lefties, I’m not bothered by persuasion. If anti-choice activists want to spend their money on “Choose Life” billboards, if that’s how they wanna pursue happiness, well, more power to ’em. And if anti-gay activists want to talk gay people out of being gay, well, they’re free to take out ads in newspapers encouraging gay people to go straight. Not that the ads they do take out are aimed at gay people. Politically motivated Jesus-made-me-straight ads are an attempt to convince straight people that the issue of gay rights would go away if gay people just weren’t so stubborn.

  (Still it’s odd that so many Christians can’t seem to grasp the Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. . . .”—especially when it comes to sex. For example, I’m relatively certain that William Bennett doesn’t want me dictating the content of his sex life. There are activities I enjoy that I doubt very much Bennett would enjoy.
And guess what? I’m happy to let William Bennett pursue his sexual pleasures in peace and quiet. Why can’t William Bennett do the same unto me? What about the right to be left alone? It’s never occurred to me burst into the bedroom of a conservative Christian couple engaged in loving, missionary-position, procreative sexual intercourse and try and talk them into sodomizing each other. [“No, no, no. Fuck her in the ass!”] I would never do that unto someone. So how come so many fundamentalist Christians out there are trying to talk me out of my boyfriend’s ass and into procreative, missionary-position sex with some miserable ex-lesbian? Why are they doing that unto me?)

  Bork and his fellow scolds shouldn’t attempt to prohibit my pleasures—or Kevin’s or Jake’s or Tim’s or yours, dear reader, or each other’s. First, because it isn’t right and, second, because prohibiting pleasures simply isn’t doable. Take me to the driest county in the most conservative state, and in two hours this determined hedonist will find you all the drugs, whores, and booze you’ll need to pass an eventful weekend. But the biggest problem in prohibiting moral and aesthetic pollutions is, of course, figuring out who gets to decide what qualifies. One man’s moral and aesthetic pollution may be central to another man’s pursuit of happiness. And when and where that happens, well, the delicate sensibilities of the majority have to yield to the desires of the individual. For while I would never wear a lime-green thong in public myself, I will defend to the death Thong Man’s right to do so.

  I got separated from Kevin and Jake and Tim in the crowd. There was only so long I could stand around watching people dance, even Tim. So still rolling on ecstasy, I wandered out of the festival grounds and onto Santa Monica Boulevard. It was ninety degrees in the sun, and since I couldn’t just stand around on street corners grinning like a lunatic, I decided to walk the six miles back to Kevin and Jake’s house.

  The premise of this book obligates me to celebrate the sin of pride, and the people I met while committing it. I failed in this effort, I suppose, since I don’t have anything all that nice to say about the rhetoric gay people kick around every year at the end of June. While I can’t stand mush-brained pride rhetoric, rainbow merchandise, and while I abhor the harm this rhetoric does to gay people and the confusion it sows among straights, what I can celebrate is the simple having of fun. The parade is, as Kevin and Jake insist, a good time. All the harm throwing the word pride does the gay community could be eliminated if we would drop the term, just as the African Americans dropped “black power,” and feminists dropped “hear me roar.” If you are a powerful black person, you don’t have to defensively insist you have power; all you have to do is exercise it. Same goes for gay pride. If you’re gay and you’re not ashamed of it, you don’t need pride. If you’re gay and you are ashamed, you’re a liar when you claim to be proud.

  On the long walk back to Kevin and Jake’s house, I passed the Tom Kat Theater, L.A.’s gay porn palace.

  I paid my ten dollars and slipped into the Tom Kat Theater. Not wanting to risk sitting down on any recently deposited DNA samples, I stood at the back. Porn has never been my thing (there are places the sun isn’t supposed to shine), nor is anonymous sex with strange men in dark theaters. (I have a hard time sharing a can of Coke with my boyfriend much less kissing someone whose mouth has been god-knows-where). But while the Tom Kat’s brand of happiness wasn’t one I would personally pursue, I was nevertheless thrilled that it was open and available to sinners who did find this brand of happiness—however icky, depressing, and desperate it might seem to me—in the theater’s seats, bathrooms, and aisles.

  Still rolling on ecstasy, I smiled at the aesthetic pollution on the screen and at the moral pollution creeping around the theater. The bottoms of my shoes were stuck to the floor as I watched one gay-for-pay straight porn star fuck another gay-for-pay straight porn star in the ass. The porn film I was watching? It was a new gay porn flick, the first installment in a series. The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride.

  My Piece, My Unit

  I simply cannot stand by and watch a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States come under attack from those who either can’t understand it [or] don’t like the sound of it.

  —Charlton Heston

  I’m holding a gun.

  I’ve never held a gun before, and it’s making my heart race.

  My instructor, Paul, is trying to give me some pointers about the proper way to handle a .22-caliber, clip-loaded handgun, but I can’t hear him over the pounding in my chest. Handguns scare the shit out of me.

  My dad was a Chicago cop who, like a lot of cops, hated handguns with the kind of passion that comes from being shot at every once in a while. When the subject of gun control came up at a neighborhood barbecue or family party, my dad wearily pointed out to anyone who was anti-gun control that handguns were designed to do one thing and one thing only: kill people. If a guy wants to hunt, he gets a hunting rifle; if a guy wants to protect his home and family, he gets a shotgun. If a guy wants to rob people on the subway or knock over convenience stores or kill a human being in cold blood, he gets a handgun.

  My dad owned a handgun, of course: his service revolver, which he kept in a locked filing cabinet. I can’t remember ever seeing him with his gun; he never showed it off to us, and he never encouraged us to play with toy guns, although he couldn’t really stop us from making guns out of sticks, fingers, and PB&J sandwiches. My dad’s attitude towards guns instilled a deep-seated fear of all guns in me as a child, and now, as an adult, about the only thing that scares me more than handguns are the nutcases who fetishize them. So I was a little nervous when I walked into the Bullet Trap, an indoor shooting range and a gun shop in Plano, Texas.

  Plano is the ugliest place I visited while working on this book. Hell, Plano is the ugliest place I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot of ugly places, from mud-brick villages in southern Egypt, to crumbling Stalinist apartment blocks on the edges of Moscow, to Gary, Indiana. Unlike Egypt and Moscow, Plano can’t plead poverty; Plano is a wealthy suburb of Dallas, where the houses are made of brick and built big. Builders have given their housing developments names like King’s Court, Steeple Chase, Willow Bend, and Old Shepard Place. Judging by the names of these pseudo-neighborhoods, you would think Texas was crammed full of legal and illegal aliens from the British Isles, and not Central and South America.

  Plano doesn’t appear to be much of a Gomorrah—not at first glance. The anglophile/anglodenial housing developments are linked to each other by six-lane roads and an almost endless string of upscale strip malls. The too-numerous-to-count, big-box chain restaurants—the multiple Chi-Chi’s, Bennigan’s, and Tony Roma’s—might make gluttony appear to be Plano’s only major sin, but Plano has its very own club for married swingers, and nearby Dallas has at least a half a dozen. On a down note, Plano’s youngsters have a serious drug problem; in the late 1990s, an epidemic of heroin abuse claimed the lives of dozens of teenagers from well-to-do families in Plano. (This is a tragedy, of course, but it’s not argument for continuing the war on drugs. The war on drugs didn’t keep heroin out of Plano, and if a war couldn’t keep heroin out of a place like Plano, it’s hard to imagine what, short of carpet-bombing, would.)

  The Bullet Trap was in a long, low, industrial building behind a Whataburger, a fast-food chain indigenous to Texas. The gun range couldn’t be seen from the road, and I wound up getting lost. I had to stop in a convenience store that sold soda, junk food, beer, rolling papers, dream catchers, and more than a hundred different kinds of lethal-looking knives (!) to ask for directions. From the outside, the Bullet Trap looked as if it could’ve been a dentist’s office once or a print shop or a you-store-it warehouse. The inside of the Bullet Trap resembled a large rec room in a hobbyist’s basement. There weren’t any windows, the place smelled musty, the carpets were industrial, the walls were paneled, and guns were displayed in glass-topped counters. There were guns I’d heard of—Colt, Smith & Wesson, Glock—and guns I hadn’t—Rugers, Taurus, Walther,
Keltel, Beretta, Kimber, Sig.

  The place was filled with men: big men, he-men, gun-lovin’ men, men who probably would shoot me if they could read what was on my mind. Looking at the guns in the cases and on the walls at the Bullet Trap—guns for sale, guns for rent—I was thinking, Christ, I wish I lived in a country that didn’t allow its citizens to own guns, any guns, handguns or rifles or shotguns. I hate guns.

  Anger is the desire for vengeance, according to Saint Augustine, but that doesn’t mean anger is necessarily bad. Saint Augustine recognized that there were times when anger was called for, moments when the thirst for vengeance is tempered by a justifiable righteous indignation. At those times, anger could be a force of good in the world.

  American gun owners regard themselves as a force for good in the world—but they’ve always seemed like an angry bunch of yahoos to me, constantly fuming about black helicopters, “jack-booted thugs” who work for the federal government, and all the damn liberals and their damn laws mandating the use of trigger locks and the safe storage of guns, both moves that would save the lives of hundreds of children every year (and not the children of liberals). Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.