You Can't Make Me

I don't usually take requests for blog topics. The main reason for this is because I almost never get one. I appreciate that you're reading (both of you!) and I know it's weak as all fuck that I'm down to posting once per week, but still, throw a brother a bone once in a while. Help me out, Jesus. Posting every day as I used to, finding topics was easy. There was always SOMEthing happening and what I missed, I was sure I'd get around to it eventually. You know what happens in a week? Fucking everything. Picking one topic is like trying to pick out one particular snowflake. I think. I don't know, I live in SoCal. I'm working in theoreticals here.

So stalwart and probably busty reader MadameOvary, easily my favorite of all my readers with reproductive-organ-sounding names,* says this, she says: "Give us a meaty, beaty, big and bouncy post about Michele Bachmann's 'husband.'" At first I'm like all "Hey, you're not the boss of me!" and then I realized I had really nothing else developing. Plus she got all her doubled consonants right in Michele Bachmann, so it was almost impossible to resist.

The problem was, I didn't really know anything about Michele Bachmann's husband. Luckily I have Google, so I know everything (eventually, broadband-connection willing). Before I dropped my first character into the search field, I kind of had a feeling that everyone else in the whole world had gotten there before me, though. It isn't always obvious (because I fail a lot), but I like to write things that are funny. And something as a) obviously high-profile and b) patently fucking absurd as a front-running presidential contender's effeminate husband who runs a gay-cure clinic is the most fecund joke-sprouting ground since Dick Cheney shot that guy in the face. Everybody hit that and hit that hard. And repeatedly. At the end of the news cycle, the whole idea was misshapen with exhaustion, like a biker-rally hooker. Methamphetamine means they can go all night.

Same thing here. The jokes write themselves. And I know I'm not going to compete with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or Jay Leno... well, I'd take a shot at Jay Leno, but I trust I've made my point? It's late and I fear I've missed the bus.

OK, so the guy tries to un-gay people. And the center of the controversy (besides, you know, the whole idea of un-gaying in the first place) is the following quote about gays to one of those "Christian" radio shows that Jesus would hate if he weren't all love: "'We have to understand: Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road. That’s what is called the sinful nature. We have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps,' Marcus Bachmann screamed at the top of his lungs three inches from the face of anyone and everyone he could reach."

That last part I added. You know, for clarity.

Partly out of fear of repeating anyone else and partly because I have boringly predictable contrarian instincts, I will say to you directly: I don't think he's gay.

I think he loves his parents. I think he wants, more than anything in the world, to be in a loving relationship with another man, but he had all this "guidance" keeping him from his "sinful nature," to what I'm sure is the great pride of Jesus Mom and Jesus Dad.

And yes, you can say he's a closet case but you can't call him a hypocrite. The strict definition of a hypocrite is someone whose actions taken do not match the path of action espoused (no pun intended). Until we have someone from rentboy.com "helping him with his luggage"if you know what I mean, then he's who he says he thinks he is. Maybe it's a charade, but we don't know it yet to be an absolute lie, do we?

I will go as far as saying this is probably the least gay man ever. I don't think he's in denial. Nobody has thought as long and hard about his sexuality as this man has; not Dan Savage, not Brian Boitano, nobody. It lives with him, just under what must now be a surface comprised entirely of tough, impenetrable emotional scar tissue. The absolute force of will it must take each and every minute of every day to get by, to maintain, to not do that thing that his nature is screaming out for him to do is impressive as all hell if you really think about it. My God, he must feel the passage of every second and say after each one falls away, "Phew, managed not to blow anyone for that one... oh God, here comes the next..." and the cycle starts all over again. The only peace the man gets must be when he nods off to sleep after dutifully servicing his wife, where in the totally excusable privacy of his subconscious thoughts it can be all backrubs and volleyball in the We Hate Shirts Club for Men. And as he lays in bed awake each morning, waiting the hour or so it takes for his unbidden and carefully untouched erection to subside, he can regard his dreams not as a source of pain or confusion but as a resounding defeat for Satan and temptation; a magisterial triumph for the limitless power and infinite tough-love of a vagina-preferring God.

Contempt is easy. It's also lazy and too easily come by. Compassion is more complicated and nuanced and, in knotty questions like this one, the sign of an advanced mind. Plus if I, as a non-Christian, can find compassion whereas people like Marcus Bachmann profess to follow the tenets of Christ and fail to... well, it's hard not rub up against the irony and purr, isn't it?

Not in a gay way, though.


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*sorry MonsieurGonad. Get you next time.