Skipping Towards Gomorrah

by Dan Savage

  “We have so much to be thankful for,” Buchanan writes at the end of Death of the West. “And while no one can deny the coarseness of her manners, the decadence of her culture, or the sickness in her soul, America is still a country worth fighting for and the last best hope of earth.”

  “We have allowed [our nation] to be severely damaged,” Bork writes at the end of Slouching Towards Gomorrah, “but perhaps not beyond repair. As we approach the desolate and sordid precincts, the pessimism of the intellect tells us that Gomorrah is our probable destination. What is left to us is a determination not to accept that fate and the courage to resist it. . . .”

  Like Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan, I’d like to end with a few hopeful words. Unlike Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan, I’m not tacking a few hopeful words onto the end of four hundred pages of “this place sucks,” “moral sewer,” “slouching towards Gomorrah,” or “what a dump.” I don’t think my country is a shithole. Indeed, I agree with Buchanan that America is the “last best hope of earth,” and, like Bennett, I believe the United States is worth fighting for—these United States—not some 1950s era dream of the United States. The country worth fighting for is the big, messy, complicated, diverse, fascinating place the United States is right now. What makes the United States the envy of the world (besides Hooters and Krispy Kremes, of course) is that this is a nation where full citizenship has nothing to do with race, religion, sex, political persuasion or, yes, personal virtue. Good or bad, religious or irreligious, male or female, left or right, of color or washed out—we’re all Americans.

  This is a country where the culture evolves and remains vibrant because people are free to challenge the existing order. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to some of our fellow citizens. America is at its best when our freedom to go our own way is restricted only when, as Thomas Jefferson said, “[our] acts are injurious to others.”

  So like Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan, I have hope. I hope that people who disagree with the scolds and the virtuecrats will go right on ignoring them; I hope that our drug laws will one day be changed to reflect reality; I hope that more people who want to cheat on their spouses will do so with their spouses’ permission; and I hope to one day spot Bill O’Reilly at a gay pride parade in heels and a bra. I hope that Americans who find happiness in sinful pursuits will always be able to exercise their God-given right to gamble, swing, smoke, eat, shoot, march, spend, and procure. And I hope that the Borks, Bennetts, and Buchanans will one day recognize that their right to pursue happiness as they define it is not threatened by the right of their fellow Americans to pursue happiness as we define it. It’s a big country, after all, with plenty of room for saints and sinners alike.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I had help.

  For his many insights, his patience, and his good humor, I would like to thank my thoroughly brilliant editor Brian Tart. For blending encouragement and nagging so effortlessly, I have to thank my literary agent, Elizabeth Wales. My research assistant, Sean Taylor, contributed huge piles of facts and figures, in addition to providing me with above-and-beyond-the-call constructive criticisms. And thanks to Amy Hughes at Dutton for keeping so many balls in the air at once.

  My brother, Bill Savage, to whom I’ve dedicated this book, is full of good advice and total bullshit in roughly equal measures—which pretty much makes him the ideal older brother. Bill read early and late drafts, encouraged me to keep writing, and got me completely shit-faced one night in Chicago when I was in despair of ever finishing this project. Thanks, Billy.

  Much thanks to my good friends Tim Keck, Mike Ranta, David Schmader, Brad Steinbacher, John Goodman, and Jason Sellards for their support and encouragement. Thanks to the staff at the Tully’s at the corner of Second and Marion in downtown Seattle, where I was allowed to sit all day for weeks while working on an early draft of this book; to Cafe Luna on Vashon Island; and to the staff of Cafe Septieme for keeping me fed while I worked twenty-hour days to meet my final deadlines. I wouldn’t have been able to write this book at all if the card dealers, drug pushers, whores, adulterers, faggots, gun nuts, and gluttons I met along the way hadn’t been so indulgent. Thanks, gang.

  I wouldn’t be able to finish this project—or any project—if it weren’t for the love and support of my boyfriend, Terry, and my son, D.J.

  Finally, I can’t close without thanking William J. Bennett, Patrick Buchanan, and, of course, Robert Bork for inspiring me to write this book.

  For a complete list of sources and notes, please visit the Web site,

  www.skippingtowardsgomorrah.com

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dan Savage is the author of The Kid and Savage Love. He is the author of the internationally syndicated column “Savage Love” and the editor of The Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

  1 Dan’s lawyer, Mark Weinhardt, has these comments: In January 2000, Dan came to Des Moines to write a piece for the Internet magazine Salon.com regarding Iowa’s “first in the nation” presidential caucuses. Searching for an angle from which to write about one of the far-right Republican candidates, Dan decided to go undercover. He became a volunteer in the presidential campaign of former Reagan domestic policy advisor and rabid gay-basher Gary Bauer.

  Dan wrote about his few days with the Bauer campaign, which he actually found disturbingly pleasant. He also wrote about his being deathly ill with the flu while at Bauer headquarters. Then the flu and politics in his article merged. Incensed over Bauer’s intolerance of people like, well, Dan, he wrote that he decided to try to get candidate Bauer sick with his flu. This would sap the Bauer campaign of momentum, literally and figuratively, before the critical New Hampshire primary, next on the agenda. Dan wrote that he prowled through an empty Bauer headquarters one day licking doorknobs, staplers, and other objects, hoping to transmit the flu to the candidate.

  Dan’s aside about political biological warfare was not exactly the centerpiece of his article, but it became the centerpiece of the reaction. Conservatives in Iowa, and even some moderates were outraged, and they said so in the local media. In fact, Dan didn’t lick, cough, or sneeze on anything. It was a joke. (No one in the Bauer camp claimed to have gotten sick.) In true gonzo journalistic fashion, Dan bent the truth a little bit to make a point about his outrage. But no one in Iowa was getting the joke.

  This little tempest in the media teapot would have been forgotten in days, but, almost as an afterthought, Dan wrote in his article about attending the actual Republican caucus for the precinct in Des Moines that included his hotel. It’s hard to go to a caucus in Iowa without finding

  some national media ogling the event, but Dan took journalism a step further. When he got to the front desk of the caucus and was offered a voter registration form, he filled it out, putting down as his address the hotel where he was staying. When it was time for the nonbinding straw poll for presidential candidates, which fascinates the media, Dan grabbed one of the little squares of paper passed out in the meeting room, checked the name of a Republican candidate, and handed it in.

  Though a number of people were upset by Dan’s phony claim of “doorknob licking,” there was no credible theory in the criminal law under which he could be prosecuted for making such claims. Sometimes, however, someone will commit an act that arouses public indignation, and then he will just happen to be prosecuted for something else, much more mundane, at about the same time. That happened to Dan.

  The following April the Polk County Attorney’s Office filed two criminal charges against Dan. One of them, a misdemeanor, charged him with voting in a “primary election” when he was not qualified to do so. The other charge alleged that he falsely claimed that he was a resident of Iowa on the voter registration form, a class D felony with a maximum five-year-sentence.

  There was no real dispute about the facts of what Dan did at t
he caucus. The battleground instead was the legal meaning of what he did. The vote fraud statutes under which Dan was charged are incredibly ambiguous. No one could remember the last time anyone had been prosecuted under those statutes. With no reported cases to guide the court, the lawyers on both sides would be making scads of “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” legal arguments about what is meant by words like vote, resident, and primary election.

  For months the prosecutor insisted that the only alternative to a trial was if Dan pleaded guilty to the felony. That was anathema to us, not only because we didn’t think Dan committed the felony, but because the consequences of a felony conviction can be severe. So we appeared inexorably headed for a public spectacle of legal quibbling, probably on Court TV. Then in the fall, for reasons I have never figured out, the State’s position softened. The State ultimately agreed to resolve the case for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor, a little bit of community service performed in Dan’s hometown, and a $750 fine.

  Neither Dan nor I were crazy about pleading guilty to anything, but it would end the whole thing. Dan pled guilty without a single media person noticing, finally resolving his case on November 7, 2000. Election Day.

  2 Randy Cohen writes the weekly column “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine: During the 2000 presidential campaign, Dan Savage did his darnedest to give Gary Bauer the flu; I don’t think this is so terrible. (Full disclosure: I may be influenced by the piece Mr. Savage contributed to my own book, and by my admiration for his column, but I’ve never even met the guy, and so I feel it’s not out of line to offer a defense of his tactics.)

  Were we perfect, we’d all make a real effort not to give colds to one another and would, for instance, don surgical masks at the first cough to keep our viruses to ourselves, like many people do in Japan and China but few of us do here in America. If we are not harried from cough-drop counter to Kleenex shelf for our heedlessness, why assail Dan Savage? Savage was striving to pass on only a minor malady. (And as an ethical matter, it is essential that he was absolutely certain that a building constructed in 1891. “[Dubuque] joined with the Mesquake [sic] Indians to exploit the rich lead mines of the area. In 1833, [the area] was opened for American settlement, and the resulting lead rush created a boomtown.” I know enough about American history to be deeply mistrustful of historic markers, especially ones in lily white parts of the country that speak of whites “joining with” local Indian tribes. While Julien Dubuque may have been a nice guy who was soliticious of the Mesquake Indians in the extreme, I didn’t see any Indians during the weeks I spent in Dubuque. I did see a lot of white people, though, and no one seemed to know what had happened to the Mesquakes. And who the hell ever heard of a lead rush?

  it was a minor malady and not a more serious illness.) He had the flu, not malaria. Had he been an Anopheles mosquito, I’d have urged him not to bite Gary Bauer on the behind. Had he been a plague-infested flea riding around on the back of a rat, I’d have persuaded him with what eloquence I could muster (using single syllable words that his flea-brain could comprehend) not to nestle down in Gary Bauer’s hair. But he was only a scribbler with a bad cold. True, his tactics did risk inflicting collateral damage on other doorknob or stapler users in Bauer’s office. And his is not a form of political protest I’d want to encourage, but the thrashing he came in for seemed out of proportion to any harm he did or could have done.

  The spectacle of someone licking not only a doorknob but an alarming array of office supplies is disgusting. However, I don’t defend it as an aesthetic act but as a political one. Savage practiced—invented—bio-satire. His was the outrage of someone personally affronted by the hate speech of a political extremist, and he found a fitting—and in my view, very funny—way to express his indignation. It was as if Jonathan Swift hadn’t merely written about eating the babies of the poor, but actually sprinkled one infant with salt—unattractive, perhaps, but hardly fatal.

  What if everyone did it? Unfortunate, but unlikely. A better way to apply the test of the categorical imperative would be to ask, What if during every presidential campaign one irate journalist tried to give one fringe candidate a bad cold? The Republic might tremble (vomit, grow feverish and exhausted, and take to its bed), but if it rests and drinks plenty of fluids, it will endure.

  3 Can you imagine the howls from right-wing nutcases had Bill Clinton spent the entire month of August on vacation and then terrorists attacked the United States in early September? Especially if Clinton had been warned during that vacation that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijak American planes inside the United States. Far from rallying around “our president,” right wingers would’ve seized on the tragedy as another chance to force Clinton from office. Clinton would’ve been accused of goofing off when he clearly should’ve been hunkered down in the Oval Office. And if Clinton made the missteps Bush did in the days immediately after the attack (running, hiding, mumbling, stumbling, sending his press secretary out to lie about “credible threats” directed against Air Force One), Ann Coulter would’ve spontaneously combusted—boom!—right there on Politically Incorrect.

  4 Maybe George W. Bush thinks he’s the president of France?

  5 Footnotes are fun, aren’t they?

  6 In 2000, the number of Americans arrested for pot-related charges was 734,498; most were arrested for possession, not dealing. Canada and Great Britain, meanwhile, are well on their way to decriminalizing marijuana use, medical and otherwise. A sane person might think that, in the wake of September 11, the federal government would have better things to do than go after pot smokers. After all, we have a real war on our hands now, against a real enemy. Maybe it was time to call off the fake war against American citizens who smoke pot? The Bush administration, however, began cracking down on pot smokers the month after September 11, raiding the suppliers of medical marijuana in states that passed medical marijuana initiatives. Didn’t George W. Bush run partly on a state’s rights platform?

  7 Hey, another footnote: I used cocaine, acid, and mushrooms in college, more than a decade before I smoked pot for the first time. So much for that “stepping stone” theory, huh? Pot was the last drug I got around to trying.

  8 A brief footnote about butt plugs: A butt plug is a perfectly pleasant little sex toy with a perfectly dreadful image. Thanks to the name, many straight people and naive young gay people assume that butt plugs are used by men who’ve lost control of their bowels as a consequence of too much anal sex. People hear “plug” and think “cork.” Nothing could be further from the truth. A butt plug is merely an anal insertion toy with a wide body, a narrow neck, and a flared base. (Picture a small Lava lamp.) While a dildo will quickly fall out of someone’s butt if it isn’t held in place, a butt plug is held in place by the anal sphincters themselves, which grip the narrow neck of the butt plug, while the flared base prevents it from disappearing into the anus. The body of the butt plug fills the rectum, where it presses against the prostate. During orgasm, as the anal sphincters contract and release, the butt plug is moved against and stimulates the prostate, which greatly intensifies orgasm.

  Popular among gay men, butt plugs are also an ideal sex toy for straight men curious about anal stimulation. Unlike dildos, butt plugs do not resemble penises, and therefore do not necessarily provoke gay panic. A straight male who is secure enough in his sexuality to insert a butt plug before engaging in vigorous vaginal intercourse with his girlfriend or his wife will be treated to a mind-blowing orgasm. FYI.

  9 Here’s my brother Bill on the title: The source for Bork’s title is probably as much Joan Did-ion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem as it is Didion’s course, W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which includes this line: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Didion’s book of essays on the cultural revolutions of the sixties uses this phrase because of the sense people had that the world was changing, and Bork, by shifting the tile to another less happy city, impl
ies that America is changing for the worse.

  But all of this imagery is profoundly un-American if you look at its roots. Yeats believed things were going to hell in a handbasket because he thought history was cyclical, and at the end of our current 2,000-year-cycle we’d be plunged into a new dark age. His evidence for this coming dark age was the decline of the aristocratic order of the world, particularly his Anglo-Irish ascendancy, as Irish Catholics ousted the British. So when this phrase gets used by folks who claim to be all-American, they’re really showing up their inborn elitism. Just as the Borks of the world seem not to have read the Sodom and Gomorrah story, they haven’t read the poem they’re alluding to either.