by Ira Glass
“I’m expecting Jenna and Barbara Bush in about half an hour,” he says. “They’re going to arrive with several of their friends, but they’re not going to stay long, they’re just going to have a few drinks and leave. Is this OK?”
My first response is surprise—Barbara Bush is coming here? Jenna I would expect, but not her grandmother. Jenna’s antics in bars have been well publicized, and it does not seem unusual to me that she would pass through our door, or any door for that matter where there is a party. But Barbara Bush? She’s got to be eighty.
“Yes, the twins. Barbara and Jenna,” the man responds quickly. Of course. I feel embarrassed that I know only the one daughter’s name.
“They’re just going to come for a little while and have a few drinks,” the advance man says. I am agitated because the lounge is bottle-service only, and serving cocktails is more work for the bartender and waitress, for less money. “How many are you expecting?” I ask. I let my irritation show.
“I don’t know. Maybe . . . eight?”
“What?” I say indignantly, throwing up my hands.
“Please,” he responds. “They’re already on their way. Please.” Yes, begging is good, I think. In lieu of money, I accept pleading. I fold my arms. “I don’t know,” I say.
“Please.” He’s on to my game and sticks out his lower lip playfully.
“Yeah, all right,” I say, bored now. I suppose it can’t hurt to have the Bush daughters here. Not twenty minutes later, I see him leading a dozen people inside.
I rush to meet them and he introduces me. “Barbara, this is Coco.”
I smile and Barbara Bush smiles wider. “Hi! How are you?” she says in a very loud voice. She immediately wraps her arms around me. “Oh my God,” she says enthusiastically, “I love your shirt. Guys, look at her shirt.” I am wearing a black turtleneck. Her friends look and nod approvingly. She surveys the room and steps very close to my face. For a minute I think she is going to kiss me. “Oh my God, this place is cool!” she shouts. “How long has it been here?” Even though the music is loud, her voice is much more forceful than needed to be heard.
“Since August,” I say.
“It’s so nice!” she says, adding, “You have pretty eyes.”
I look around and spot Ariana and grab her arm. “Make sure that you give them a round on us,” I tell her. “And, um, Barbara is a bit of a close-talker if you know what I mean.”
“Oh yeah?” Ariana says. That is all she ever says. I could confess all my sins to her, tell her I slaughtered my entire family and she would respond, “Oh yeah?” I am irritated that Ariana doesn’t share my excitement about the Bush girls being in the house, and so I snap, “I see empty glasses on the tables.”
From behind me I hear a loud voice. “Thank you, this is great, really.” I turn around and there is Barbara, drink in hand, so close that if I just thrust my lips out a little we would touch. She is smiling widely, and I smile, too. Her friendliness and lack of pretense make it impossible not to like her.
“I love this song!” Barbara exclaims, grabbing my wrists and starting to wave my arms around. She throws her shoulders back and grinds her hips. It is the part of the evening when the DJ goes old school with Guns N’ Roses. For people who work here every night, this is the saddest point.
Fifteen minutes later, I step outside to make sure the entrance is swept, and there I see Barbara bent over, hands on her knees, out on the sidewalk. “Are you all right?” I ask. Please, I think, don’t let me see her throw up.
She spits on the pavement. “Yeah, I just needed some fresh air,” she says. She stands and I see her forehead is damp with sweat. It must be twenty degrees out, and windy. I want to go back into the warm restaurant, but I stay with her.
I massage her back for a moment. Finally she lets out a loud burp, mumbles, “Excuse me,” and returns inside.
A few moments later she and everyone in her entourage are leaving. As they file out, it seems odd to me that the president’s daughters are not accompanied by Secret Service agents. I have not noticed anyone in black suits with ear pieces or carrying walkie-talkies. Where were Barbara’s minders when she was nearly sick outside? I ask Kevin, standing watch at the door, if he noticed anyone.
“They’re supposed to stay undercover, blend in,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. It seems obvious.
“Do you want to be a Secret Service officer?” I ask, imagining that is the pinnacle of the security field.
He looks at me as if I am an idiot. “I’m in school for accounting,” he says.
Spring comes, and I have a new job: working outside as a doorkeeper. From 10:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m., I am on my feet.
Kevin and I spend the time waiting and talking. He calls his girlfriend or checks on his car. We wave to the neighbors we recognize and their pets. With so much time together, we end up repeating the same stories over and over. “Did I tell you about this pedicure I got?” I ask him. “They clipped my toenails too short. I am so mad.”
“Yeah, you already told me that,” he says. “Why don’t you sue for pain and suffering?”
It is quiet. We are not doing much business anymore. Some nights, only a few of the tables in the lounge are taken. Maybe it is the weather, or maybe everyone is over at Marquee and the other new clubs that have opened. This has made Karim, the owner, testy.
Karim still makes me nervous. When he talks to me, I have the habit of stuttering or speed-talking, using way too many words. Kevin, though, does not fear him. As the restaurant has lost some of its magic, he has begun expressing his sarcasm. When we see Karim pulling his truck into the garage, Kevin announces, “Daddy’s home.”
The models he is with tonight are very young and very beautiful. “Those looked way young, didn’t they?” I say to Kevin after they have gone inside.
“Yeah, but Karim can still pour vodka into their sippy cups,” he says.
A few minutes later, Karim comes out to look around at the crowd, but there is only Kevin and me. Kevin starts waving his arms frantically and jumping around. “Karim, over here! Karim, I’m over here, man!”
Karim scowls. I cannot hold my laughter. Karim gives us a list of people he’s expecting, but it’s irrelevant because I’m letting everyone in. We’re empty.
In mid-June, I give him my notice, telling him I will leave the restaurant at the end of the month. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I am considering auditioning for parts, or going back to school, anything. Working as a hostess or a door person is not a career.
“But you just learned how to do your job,” Karim says, shaking his head. He shrugs his shoulders and walks away from me.
MY REPUBLICAN JOURNEY
Dan Savage
This is excerpted from a series of three stories that originally ran in The Stranger, Seattle’s weekly alternative paper, over the course of the 1996 presidential elections. That year, Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary, on a platform of economic populism and culture war. This was familiar territory for Buchanan. He’d run on the same issues four years before, culminating famously in his keynote speech on the opening night of the 1992 Republican National Convention, where he declared “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.”
Buchanan kept with these themes in New Hampshire in the weeks before this series started to run, pledging to uphold “eternal truths that do not change from the Old and New Testament.” Homosexuality, in his view, was “anti-biblical and amoral.” He was also on record saying things like “Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.” He’d also declared that AIDS was payback against gays: “They have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
Two weeks after Buchanan won the 1996 New Hampshire primary, Savage decided he could not sit on the sidelines any longer, and showed up at his first neighborhood
Republican meeting.
PART ONE
“Your job as a Republican Precinct Committee Officer is an extremely important one. In many respects, you are the Republican Party within your neighborhood.”
Hello, my name is Dan Savage and I am the Republican Party in my neighborhood. I am the Republican Precinct Committee Officer for Precinct 1846 in the 43rd District. If you have any questions about the Republican Party, our platform, or any of our candidates, feel free to give me a call here at work.
You’re probably wondering two things. First, if I’m serious. I am. Second, how a commie-pinko drag fag sex-advice columnist with a fourteen-year-old boyfriend (kidding) managed to find a home in the hate-mongering, gay-bashing Republican Party?
Well, let me tell you something, pal: the Republican Party is a big tent, a huge tent. There were no ideological litmus tests at the Republican Party caucuses I attended last Tuesday night. I didn’t even have to produce a voter registration card or a picture ID: a measure of the respect the Republican Party has for the rights of the individual. I just walked through the door, signed on the dotted line (Dan Savage “certifies that he/she considers himself/herself Republican”), and that was it. Who knew going over to the dark side could be so simple?
What prompted my conversion? Why would someone who’s never once voted Republican on a local or national ticket, someone who voted for Walter Mondale and would do so again, join the Republican Party? Well, the Republican presidential primaries, specifically the early successes of fellow Irish Catholic Pat Buchanan, got me thinking about my childhood.
When I was beginning to drift away from the Catholic Church, out of disgust with our holy mother’s hypocrisy, sexism, and homophobia, my biological mother implored me to keep the faith. “If everyone who isn’t an asshole leaves the church,” my momma told me, “the church will be just a bunch of assholes.”
In my mother’s opinion, the best way to change an oppressive, backward, socially malevolent institution such as the Catholic Church is from the inside. Well, after listening to Pat Buchanan’s victory speech the night of the New Hampshire primary, it occurred to me that maybe the same goes for the Republican Party. If progressives joined the GOP, perhaps we could temper its social Neanderthalism.
Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” conservatism helped cost the Republicans the White House in ’92. A little moderation, a few cooler heads, and we could save the Republicans from themselves, and in the process perhaps save ourselves from the Republicans.
So I called the King County Republican Central Committee, found out the location of the caucuses in the 43rd, and went. The first shock was the location: my caucus was at Seattle Central Community College, steps from my apartment and smack-dab in the middle of Seattle’s gay community. I know there are gay Republicans in Seattle—I’ve beat up enough of them—but I thought Republicans gay and straight would at least have the courtesy to meet the hell off Capitol Hill. But there they were, bold as brass, at Pine and Broadway.
The second shock of the evening was the tremendously diverse group of Hill Republicans in the room. There were old white people, young white people, tall white people, short white people, male white people, female white people, skinny white people, fat white people, socially maladapted white people, and white people with a full complement of social skills. There were, of course, a few of those troubling gay white people. That the Republican Party is a collection of homogenous, flat-earth motherfuckers is obviously a lie of the sneaky liberal media elite.
While waiting for the voting to begin, we were treated to a few videos: a Bob Dole video with a lot of smiling white people in it, and a Lamar Alexander video with a lot of beaming white people in it. Then we watched videos touting Republican candidates for governor: Pam Roach, Jim Waldo, Norm Maleng, Ellen Craswell.
Then came the third shock of the evening. Since I was the only person from my precinct (the 43rd District is divided up into a hundred or so precincts), and these were the precinct caucuses, I was automatically appointed my precinct’s committee officer. And guess what? Precinct committee officers get to be delegates to the County Republican Convention on May 11 at Seattle Pacific University. According to the woman I spoke with at the King County Republican Committee office, since I’m the 1846’s PCO, I don’t have to stand for election as a delegate. I’m “automatically a delegate.” I’m in. They’re stuck with me, and there ain’t nothing they can do about it. I feel so . . . empowered.
Before we got down to voting, or “indicating our preferences,” for president and governor, all us white people filled out a survey. According to a letter from Reed M. Davis, chairman of the King County Republican Party, this survey would “provide guidance to our Platform Committee on many key issues.” It seemed to me the questions were written in such a way as to indicate exactly what the Platform Committee thought about these issues, and we, the Republican rank and file, were only there to rubber-stamp the platform folks’ foregone conclusions.
The nice young man running the caucus read all the survey questions aloud (“Should law-abiding citizens be prohibited from owning firearms?” “Do you agree with Republican-led efforts to require parental notification before a minor can have an abortion?”), and did very well, only stumbling slightly when the time came to read questions concerning “special rights” to the caucus participants. “Should the state of Washington recognize same-sex marriages?”
Now, as I said before, there were about a half dozen gay men in the room. None of them blanched at the loaded, leading question about gay marriage; none leapt up exclaiming, “Wait a minute! You’re exploiting people’s fear and hatred of homosexuals for short-term political gain! I won’t stand for it!” That didn’t happen. My fellow gay Republicans, like me, filled out the form in silence. Which, the last time I checked, equaled death.
Doing my part to pull the Republican Party to the left, I gave opposite answers from the ones the survey’s authors hoped to get. I voted yes on gay marriage, no on parental notification, yes on gun control, and so on.
You’re probably curious as to who I voted for. For president: Pat Buchanan. For governor: Ellen Craswell—a scary Christian conservative with Ronald Reagan’s throat, Nancy Reagan’s hairdo, and Frances Farmer’s post-lobotomy joie de vivre.
Wait a minute: Didn’t I join the GOP to pull the party to the left, to change it (for the better) from within? Why then did I vote for the most conservative candidates? Well, I have this theory: The scarier and more conservative the Republican nominees, the better the Democrats will do in the fall. And the better the Demos do, the sooner the Repubs will realize their “social” conservatism is a losing game. Then they’ll give up the gay-bashing, immigrant-bashing, female-bashing, race-baiting bullshit.
See, back when I was a Democrat, I wanted the Demos to win’cause, well, I was a Democrat. Now that I’m a Republican, I want the Demos to win because it’s in the long-term best interests of the Republican Party.
Well, I’ve got to go doorbelling now, one of my “primary responsibilities” as the 1846’s Republican PCO. I’ll let you know how the King County convention goes. In the meantime, why not join me here in the GOP’s big tent? Washington State’s Presidential Primaries are coming up on Tuesday, March 26. Since Bill Clinton has the Democratic nomination wrapped up, why not vote in the Republican primary? Go to your polling place, ask for a Republican ballot, and vote for Buchanan and Craswell: it’s the right thing to do.
PART TWO
Last month I joined the Republican Party and wrote a little article about it. Due to the dearth of Republicans on Capitol Hill, I wound up an automatic delegate to the King County Republican Convention. But then the Republicans did a stoopid thing: they told a reporter from the Seattle Times I’d filled out the wrong forms, and I wasn’t going to be a delegate—not now, not never. They weren’t going to seat me. By the time the Republicans realized they’d made a simple clerical error, that I’d filled out the right forms and was in fact, a delegate, it was too late.
KVI, KIRO, KING-TV, KOMO-TV, CBS, NPR, the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the AP wire, and United Press International all picked up the story: “Republican Party Attempts to Toss Out Drag Queen Delegate!”
A couple of weeks after I’d traveled over to the Dark Side, Daniel Mead Smith, Chair of the 43rd, wrote me a letter. “I think you will be surprised that the ‘hate-mongering, gay-bashing, neo-fascist Republican Party’ does not exist in the 43rd,” Smith wrote. “I invite you to come to one of our meetings and see for yourself.” Last Saturday, I went to one of Smith’s meetings to see for myself: the 43rd District Republican Caucus. This caucus was the second in a series of Republican events crowding my calendar this spring and summer: precinct caucus, district caucus, county convention, state convention, and (keeping my fingers crossed) the National Republican Convention this August in San Diego.
I arrived at the Montlake Community Center for the 1996 43rd District Republican Caucus at 8:00 a.m. I paid my five dollars, signed in, grabbed a seat, and waited for the work to begin: we were here to elect delegates to the State Republican Convention coming up Memorial Day weekend, and vote on nonbinding resolutions. While waiting for the action to start, I was treated to a tape loop of Ellen Craswell, Republican candidate for governor, stating and restating her opposition to gun control, gay rights, and “moral decay.” A nice older lady and her husband sat down next to me, and I was helping her with some forms when she asked me what I did for a living. “I’m a writer.” “What do you write?” she pressed. “A sex advice column.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling at me sweetly, “you’re that person.”
The caucus began with a prayer—we asked God to guide us in selecting delegates—and then we were ready to pledge allegiance to the flag. Only trouble was, no one brought a flag. I thought about suggesting we pledge allegiance to the fag—hey, that’s me!—but I didn’t want to be disruptive.