Don't Get Too Comfortable (14 page)

There is only one more show to go. Viktor and Rolf, a forward-thinking Dutch duo, have chosen as their venue Trocadéro, the almost fascistically spare complex of buildings overlooking the Eiffel Tower. The interior is blessedly cool and full of fog lapping along the floor. We are instructed to descend to the basement hall quietly and slowly. We comply, since with roughly eight feet of visibility we are concentrating on not falling down the stairs. I find my seat and watch as a woman emerges from the mist. She still insists on wearing her sunglasses and talking on her cell phone, while holding her seat assignment three inches from her face. She is swallowed up in another cloud and I wonder how she will perform all these tasks with such limited sensory capacities. I listen for the sound of crashing chairs or the roar of the sea serpents who will devour her when she falls off the edge of the earth.

The show is all stark conceptualism. The writer and futurist guru Douglas Coupland has written the catalog's introductory essay and also came up with the names of each of the collection's twelve dresses. Titles like “MP3/NHK/‘Daisy'/Enter your 4-digit PIN number and press ‘OK'/Mp3/Nihon Hoso Kyokai TV” and “OPD/PFD/‘Hawk'/System error/Please restart/Officially Pronounced Dead/PhotoShop File Document.”

The show's beginning is announced by two gongs. There is no music, but that's no matter because the dresses themselves tintinnabulate with the garlands of brass bells that adorn them. The models jingle like Lapland reindeer, which is the only indication we have of their approach. The other sound is the steady stream of cursing coming from the frustrated photographers who are unable to get a clear shot.

How on earth would any of the Ladies get one of these garments through the metal detectors at the airport? But the larger question is an economic one. How does any of this sustain a business? I've been told that couture builds the prestige and identity of a house, it is the thing that moves the blue jeans and the sportswear and the fragrance, but Viktor and Rolf don't have a perfume to the best of my knowledge. How are they paying the craftspeople who are sewing these bells on? The wages for the final dress alone, the show's putative bridal gown—“KGB/LAX/‘Rabbit'/Be Kind • Rewind/Kommitet Gozudvastenoi Beznopasnosti/Los Angeles International Airport”—must have been fairly steep. It is entirely covered in bells, tipping the scale at close to a hundred pounds, I am sure. We can tell before we see it because it sounds like a chain gang of Jacob Marleys coming to get us. Out of the mist she comes, Carmen Kass, she of the perfect fuck-you strut. Her wings have finally been clipped. Even she can barely walk under the weight, plodding with the pained and rapturous vacancy of a medieval saint. A perfect coda to the week, this Slave of Fashion, bidding me good-bye. She shambles past and is obscured by another bank of clouds, leaving behind only the sound of her utmost vanquishment, her robes clanking like a martyr's chains.

BEAT ME, DADDY

W
hat is it about house music that makes gay men want to buy underpants? The regular
whump, whump
from the street-level sound system of the Universal Gear store pulses up through the floor of the Washington headquarters of the Log Cabin Republicans, the largest gay and lesbian organization in the GOP.

As someone who can still barely comprehend the concept of Jewish conservatives, despite their shaming and undeniable existence, I know I am a naïve throwback to a time when both visible and invisible minorities largely allied themselves with progressive politics. Having only just arrived in D.C. on an overcast day in October 2003 for my first direct encounter with gay Republicans, I am a veritable Darwin in the Galápagos, slack-jawed in the presence of this confounding genus, a creature that seems to invite its own devouring; the cow helpfully outlining its tastiest cuts on its side with chalk, while happily pouring the A-1 sauce over its own head.

Mark Mead, director of public affairs, is familiar with my particular brand of astonishment. “I've heard it all. Everything from ‘You guys are like Jewish Nazis' to ‘What are you, the syrup lobby?'” What the Log Cabin Republicans really are, he informs me, is a band of political renegades, ten thousand strong. “We're the cutting edge of the gay civil rights movement.”

I almost respond with a hearty “And I am Marie of Romania!” until I see that he is not joking.

Mead and I are sitting in his office, located on the second floor of a low brick building on Seventeenth Street near Dupont Circle, D.C.'s gay neighborhood. Out of keeping with the area, certainly worlds away from downstairs' Ecstasy-fueled dance-club soundtrack, this suite is among the least homosexual places I have ever been. With its mismatched laminate furniture, patterned industrial-strength nylon carpet, overhead fluorescent lighting, and scattered computer terminals, it could pass for any middling place of business: a paper supplier, an insurance broker. The walls are largely bare, save for a photo of super-butch, mustachioed Teddy Roosevelt, the ultimate Village People cop, along with a framed copy of the Gettysburg Address, a document absolutely central to the mythology of the Log Cabinites. Their name stems from the rough-hewn structure in which Honest Abe was born. The group's very identity as Republicans depends at least in part upon the belief that the party of Lincoln is at heart still, well, the party of Lincoln; an inclusive party, the Big Tent party. “Big Tent” is invoked in almost every conversation I have, a mantra about as descriptively apt as the wishful four-year-old at Halloween who announces “I'm a scary monster!” to every grown-up proffering candy.

I have arrived during strange and accelerated days for those toiling in gay rights. The Supreme Court overturned Texas's long-standing ban on sodomy in June 2003, and over the course of a few short months, the debate has graduated from the right to engage in private consensual sex to an open, although not necessarily civil, discussion of the freedom for gays and lesbians to marry. If anyone can be credited with firing the first shot in the battle, it would have to be justice Antonin Scalia, whose minority dissent darkly augured that the June decision could spell the end of all morals-based legislation in this country. The republic had been forcibly bound into a pair of buttered skis and was perched at the top of a slippery slope, at the bottom of which lay a land overrun by gay and lesbian weddings. An initiative called Marriage Protection Week concluded just prior to my arrival in town. Spearheaded by a loose coalition of far-right organizations, it consisted of little more than an official proclamation—signed by George W. Bush—which stated unequivocally in its third sentence that “Marriage is a union between a man and a woman.” That can't have made gay Republicans feel terribly well liked under the Big Tent.

“I'm not in politics to be liked, I'm in politics to make change,” says Mead.

A Mississippi native, Mead is a clean-cut, boyish man of forty-two, with a broad face and a ready smile, projecting suburban Dad stability, and a kind of “Kiss the Cook”–barbecue-apron-wearing good humor. He worked for a long time with Equality Georgia, a gay rights organization that lobbied for, and helped secure, domestic partnership benefits at large Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola. His best friend is a liberal Democrat who works for County Welfare in Los Angeles, although he admits they don't really talk politics. Despite his assertions to the contrary, he is a very likable guy, except for an odd moment in the first hour of our meeting, when he tells me about his life partner, who works at the EPA. The confirmation of the new head of the agency was being held up at that very moment by, among others, junior senator from New York Hillary Clinton, who was taking exception to the agency's obfuscation of the environmental dangers posed to rescue and salvage workers by the air at Ground Zero. Mead echoes the administration's party line to me. “
Everyone
knew the air was bad. They had respirators, but you know, cops and firemen can be real macho cowboys, ‘We don't need respirators . . .'” he says.
Oh right
, I think, suddenly brought back to reality.
You're a Republican.

Mead works in concert with Log Cabin's executive director, a man named Patrick Guerriero. Guerriero is thirty-six years old, a good-looking, swarthy, supersmart man. When we first meet, he has only been in Washington for ten months and is not yet a victim of that town's widespread disease, the scourge that obliterates the personal style of all who move there. There is still some smolder beneath the broadcloth. Elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives at age twenty-five, he left in his third term to serve as the mayor of Melrose, the Boston suburb of thirty thousand where he grew up. He was reelected with more than eighty percent of the vote but stepped down to become the deputy chief of staff for then-governor of Massachusetts Jane Swift. She tapped him as her running mate for the following election. Guerriero would have been the nation's first openly gay lieutenant governor, but Swift withdrew from the race. He took over at Log Cabin in January of 2003.

We go to lunch together at a nearby Mexican restaurant. The only two people in the place on this gray day, we sit underneath strings of chili-pepper lights. It makes for a very sad fiesta. Perhaps abjection is just in the air as I can't help wondering why someone would take a blowtorch to such a promising political résumé. With the exception of that Jai Rodriguez fellow—the Culture expert on
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy—
Patrick Guerriero might just have the worst gay job in America.

“I had to wrestle with myself for three months before taking it,” Guerriero says. In a nation divided almost equally between Democrat and Republican, he sees the Log Cabin presence in the party as a duty, unpleasant though it may be at times. Any significant legislation that is drafted and passed in this country requires bipartisan support, he says. “No one has ever given me the model to change America without doing what we're doing as a part of it. You can't get there by completely abandoning one American political party, you just can't. How do I keep my personal integrity and remain Republican? I wonder about that at least once a day, and I check my gut, and the response to my gut check is: ‘You need to stay and fight this battle. If you leave, who's going to do it?'”

Who indeed? The amount of snickering and downright hostility that must go on behind his back among his supposed allies beggars the imagination. I remember a grim old joke about bigotry. “What's the definition of a kike?” I ask him. “A Jewish gentleman who has just left the room.”

“I'm sure that happens. But I also bet when I leave the room on a number of occasions, the interaction of debate and dialogue will have changed some minds and some attitudes.”

Minds and attitudes that he necessarily must change if Log Cabin is to be anything but a miserable failure within the party. Guerriero sees the debate over gay marriage as the right's last chance to ratify bigoted legislation before the juggernaut of history grinds them beneath its wheels, and the bigots will not give up without a fight. “The next phase is going to be ugly,” he warns, “but they cannot beat the unstoppable force.”

Unstoppable force! Ha! And I am Marie of . . . Oh.

It shouldn't be a surprise that Guerriero is willing to content himself with short shrift, given his other lifelong affiliations. “I have a lot of strikes against me,” he jokes. “I'm a Catholic from the archdiocese of Boston, from a Democratic family, and I'm a Red Sox fan. I've chosen to stay in institutions I care about.”

I suspect that Guerriero's family loves him no matter what his party affiliation, and last I checked the Red Sox didn't try to reverse the Curse of the Bambino by crowding all the homos into the obstructed-view seats. As for the archdiocese of Boston . . . 'nuff said. It's all well and good to stay in the institutions you care about, but wouldn't it be nice to feel that the institution, in turn, cared about you, or at least wasn't hell-bent on your eradication or, failing that, the legislating away of your rights? It seems a misdirected penance, this martyring oneself to a cause when the cause itself is the source of the suffering. Lovingly polishing the handle of the knife sticking into your side instead of just pulling it out. Surely, I suggest, there is a point at which one's self-respect has to count for something?

“You are counseling what the far right wants to happen,” he says.

So why not give the far right its wish, I think? Why not work toward its effective and long-ranging disempowerment from someplace else? I must be wearing my bewildered “
What
the
fuck
?” look again, because Guerriero adds, “I know exactly what you're going through.”

But I'm not the one going through it. It is Guerriero who has used the word “bearable” numerous times over the course of our lunch, always to justify his remaining in the job. My delusions are of a different, somewhat patronizing variety. Looking across the table, I keep thinking that Guerriero will take off the mask at any moment. Here we are, after all, away from the dreary office, both gay, enjoying a sprightly conversation about politics without rancor or name-calling. At some point, he will see the futility of trying to fight for gay rights within the Republican Party and off we'll go to the nearest independent bookstore (with a brief stop at the Phillips Collection to see its wonderful Edward Hoppers) to buy Al Franken's latest tome, all the while laughingly shaking our heads at Guerriero's misguided, delusional episode working for Satan. What I am feeling about Guerriero has been felt about intelligent, handsome, confirmed bachelors such as him from time immemorial. I am thinking:
I can change him.

AS WE EMERGE
from Log Cabin HQ onto Seventeenth Street that evening, Guerriero briefly locks eyes with a young man. They hold each other's gaze for a second or two, the universal gay semaphore for mutual attraction. “Boys,” he sighs. “I never know if they're cruising me or glaring because they see me coming out of this office.” I have come to pick up Mead and Guerriero, who are taking me to the inaugural reception for an advocacy group called Freedom to Marry.

The gathering is being held in a private home, a modern box of brick and glass on a tree-lined street of older brownstones. The place is a crush of people, mostly men still wearing their work clothes. I don't spend a lot of my waking life feeling terribly sexy, but in our nation's capital, I feel almost Genet-like by comparison. Spying openly gay, liberal Democrat Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank by the buffet table, I rush over to try out on him—as a kind of rhetorical exercise—Guerriero's theory that in this evenly divided nation, the future of gay rights is dependent on this band of rebels bravely working for compromise on the right. He looks at me through lowered eyes, as if to ask,
And how long have you been smoking crack?

“They've been telling me ‘We're just starting out' for fifteen years,” he says. “And they just don't deliver. One of the biggest differences between the parties is on gay and lesbian issues.”

“Say nice things about us, Barney,” says Guerriero as he passes through the crowd at that moment.

“No, Patrick. I've got to tell the truth.” He turns back to me. “They're woefully unsuccessful, but
he
,” meaning Guerriero, “is intellectually honest, at least. Look, the argument that this is better for gay rights makes no sense. They say, ‘Well, isn't it good that we try to persuade the Republicans to do better?' They helped put this administration in power. If it was inevitable, then you can get credit for moderating its effects. But if you start the fire, you don't get any credit for putting it out. They're Republican for economic reasons,” he concludes.

The counterargument from gay Republicans to such a charge is that while they may be (deeply,
deeply
) enamored of Republican tax cuts, they are Republican for many reasons beyond mere economics. They are equally concerned with matters of national security, foreign policy, gun control, and terrorism. They are not single-issue voters, not even around their own sexual orientation. If Bush needs to gin up his base with some homophobic saber-rattling by voicing support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage forever and always, so be it.

Such abject masochism may make for great Billie Holiday songs—it kind of ain't nobody's business if Lady Day is beat up by her papa; he isn't hoping to pack the courts with antichoice troglodytes or to defund social security—but the Log Cabin blues have ramifications beyond the merely personal. It might be a price they are willing to pay for the sweet lovin' they feel they're getting from the rest of the GOP package, but I didn't sign on to get knocked around by someone else's abusive boyfriend.

In an article in
The New York Times,
a Log Cabin member, in excusing one of the President's gay-baiting screeds, dismissed it with “[it's] more for the constituents back home . . . just, you know, politics.”

Those constituents back home to whom this fresh gay meat is routinely thrown, can't you just see them? A ragtag group of neglected souls who just need some empty, you know, politics to mollify them now and then. There are only about, you know, thirty million of them. Poor disenfranchised things. If only they had a cable news network of their own, or a ubiquitous, voluble punditocracy of intolerant gasbags catering to their worldview. Miraculously, though, they agree with Barney Frank about one thing: “Follow the money” is also their explanation for the existence of the Log Cabin Republicans.