One Hand Jerking (19 page)

Barry Crimmins: “I think about him almost every day and he really, really, really has kept me honest on the stage. I don't get fucked with because of what he did. Speech became a lot freer, thanks to Lenny. I have never had to worry about local police officials monitoring my shows. The only true censorship I've faced has been commercial in nature.”

Paul Provenza: “He influenced me in a big way, now more than ever. I didn't realize that I would politicize comedically until I grew to a point where I can come out with the truth. When I was first listening to Lenny, all I was thinking about was comedy, and I realize now that it was the other way around. His comedy was about what he was thinking and feeling.”

Veteran comedian George Carlin sums it up: “Lenny Bruce opened the doors for all the guys like me; he prefigured the free-speech movement and helped push the culture forward into the light of open and honest expression. I like to find out where the line is drawn, and then drag the audience across the line with me, and make them happier for the experience. Lenny opened all the doors, or kicked them down.”

Among the doors Lenny kicked down were the traditional targets of stand-up performers—airplane food, Chinese waiters, their wives' cooking, driving and frigidity—and instead he went after, in Carlin's words, “the powerful people, to puncture the pretentiousness and pompousness of the privileged.”

A documentary,
Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth
, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1999, but as producer Robert Weide told me, prophetically, “If there's a documentary about the Holocaust, it will win.”

“You don't think you have any chance at all?”

“The odds against
my
film winning are six million to one.”

Lenny really would've appreciated that.

When rock star Bono received an award at the Golden Globes ceremony in 2003, he said, “This is fucking brilliant.” However, the FCC ruled that he had
not
violated broadcast standards, because his use of the offending word was “isolated and nonsexual.” You see, it was merely an adjective.

But then Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson's breast during the half-time extravaganza at the Super Bowl. I had never seen the media make such a mountain out of an implant. The incident served as an excuse to crack down on indecency during this election year.

So, in February 2004, the FCC reversed the Bono decision, contending that his utterance was “indecent and profane” after all.

And has Governor Pataki now decided to revoke his posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce?

In November 2002, an appeals court ruled that Louisiana's 197-year-old anti-sodomy law did not discriminate against gays and lesbians. The state Supreme Court had previously claimed that the law against oral and anal sex did not violate the right to privacy, based on an appeal, but then plaintiffs, the Louisiana Electorate of Gays and Lesbians Inc., challenged the law, asking the appeals court to consider the trial judge's ruling that the law did not amount to
unconstitutional
discrimination.

So it was good news a month later when the United States Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Constitution permits states to enforce anti-sodomy laws exclusively against same-sex couples. Until then, the Court had hesitated to admit that such discrimination violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws.” There was fear that if they overturned a Texas law which criminalized “deviate sexual acts” between people of the same sex, it could affect state laws on adoption, foster care, marriage, and employment.

In fact, back in 1986, the Supreme Court
upheld
Georgia's outlawing of consensual homosexual sodomy. That story made front page headlines. A few months later, however, there was only a small news item on the inside pages when that same Court refused to reinstate a law in Oklahoma that outlawed consensual
heterosexual
sodomy. This meant that if Sandra Day O'Connor participated in a threesome with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas during recess, indulging in an infinite variety of positions, only the two men could be arrested.

In an anthology,
Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation From People Who Know a Thing or Two
, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce writes: “I'm still the reluctant pornographer, but in this era of rampant assimilationism and gay conservatism, I see pornography as the last refuge of gay radicalism.” Let us hope, then, that legislation in America will eventually catch up with the porn industry.

It should not be forgotten that, during his first term as Senate Republican
majority leader, Trent Lott publicly compared homosexuality to kleptomania; voted yes on prohibiting same-sex marriage; voted no on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation; blocked the nomination of openly gay philanthropist James Hormel as a U.S. ambassador; and was lambasted for ignoring a surge in anti-gay hate crimes even after the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard became international news.

Although skin color cannot be changed—except perhaps for Michael Jackson—there is currently a movement to transform gays into straights. Ironically, Robert Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, was a central figure in persuading the American Psychiatric Association to de-pathologize homosexuality in 1973, but he recently reported the results of a study in which two-thirds of a gay and lesbian sample successfully went through “conversion therapy.”

Dr. Spitzer defends himself: “What I found was that, in the unique sample I studied, many made substantial changes in sexual arousal and fantasy—and not merely behavior. Even subjects who made a less substantial change believed it to be extremely beneficial. Complete change was uncommon. My study concluded with an important caveat: that it should not be used to justify a denial of civil rights to homosexuals, or as support for coercive treatment. I did not conclude that all gays should try to change, or even that they would be better off if they did. However, to my horror, some of the media reported the study as an attempt to show that homosexuality is a choice, and that substantial change is possible for any homosexual who decides to make the effort.”

But, in
The Advocate
, a national gay news magazine, Michelangelo Signorile points out that “conversion therapies have been shown to be harmful. A five-year study of 150 people published in the
Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy
in 2001 strongly concluded that ‘participants in conversion therapies are plagued by serious psychological and interpersonal problems after termination.' These findings were consistent with several other papers published in journals during the 1990s. . . . With religious right-backed ‘ex-gay' groups promoting conversion therapies in full-page newspaper ads for several years now—and recently in in ads in Washington, D.C. subway stations—the time for the vast majority of psychologists to take a stand would seem to be at hand.”

And when Bill Clinton became president in 1992, it was thought that discrimination against gays in the military would finally end. But then Colin Powell—the first African-American to become head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—acted to prevent such progress. In my dreams, I confronted him:

“General Powell,” I said, “you insist that sharing the barracks with a gay soldier would make the other men uncomfortable, but didn't they used to say the same thing about
blacks
in the military?”

“Well, yes,” he replied, “ but we never
told
anybody we were black.”

This was the forerunner of “Don't ask, don't tell.”

An associate producer of Fox TV's
The O'Reilly Factor
, hosted by professional curmudgeon Bill O'Reilly, has accused him of sexual harassment, claiming that he pressured her to have phone sex and tried to engage her in conversations about masturbation, vibrators, oral sex, threesomes and foreplay involving a loofah, which O'Reilly also called “the falafel thing [that] I'd put on your pussy . . .” But there's one flaming desire he didn't bring up with her, which he
did
proclaim when Dan Savage was a guest on his program.

Savage writes an outrageously rational sex advice column, “Savage Love,” online and in alternative papers, from the
Village Voice
in New York to the
Orange County Weekly
in California. We met when he was a member of a panel discussion about “Sex and Humor.” I was the moderator. He referred to heteros like me as “breeders.” I have a biological daughter, but since Savage and his male partner have adopted a child, I appreciate where he was coming from.

A reader once wrote to Savage, “I am a mature teenage girl with a question for you. My brother was watching a porno site with one of his friends and claims he saw a video clip of a man sticking his entire head up a woman's pussy! I say it's impossible! The woman would die! My brother says that if a woman can give birth, she can get a man's head up there. Set us straight, Dan.” It was signed, “Can U Now Talk?”

Savage replied: “If your brother wants to win this argument, CUNT”—readers know that Savage uses the initials of their pseudonyms—“all he has to do is take you to the porn site where he saw this video clip. If he can't, well, then he's clearly lying. As for your brother's argument, anyone who's taken a high school health class should be able to see through it. Baby's skulls are small and soft,
while full-grown men's skulls are big and hard. Still, I'm reluctant to tell you that it's impossible for a man to stuff his entire head into a woman's pussy. There may actually be a video clip out there somewhere of a tiny man sticking his teensy head into a big woman's huge vagina. If someone out there has a video clip of this, please
do not
send it to me. So let's just file this sex act under unlikely-bordering-on-impossible.”

Promoting his book,
Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America
, Savage did a guest stint on
The O'Reilly Factor
. He defended pot smokers and sex educators. But then Bill O'Reilly asked what he thought about gay bathhouses. O'Reilly must have already known how he would answer, since Savage has been bashing bathhouses for a decade in his column.

“And, guys,” he had written, “are gay bathhouses even necessary these days? Web sites such as
gay.com
have basically turned every gay man's apartment into a virtual/potential gay bathhouse, so do we really need to go to the real thing anymore? Why eat out when you can order in?” So now, Savage answered O'Reilly, “I hate gay bathhouses, and I think they should be closed.”

O'Reilly shouted, “I want to go to a gay bathhouse!” He kept repeating it: “I want to go to a gay bathhouse! I want to go to a gay bathhouse!”

Savage recalls, “I was stunned. There I was, sitting across the table from the darling of the American right, and he was shouting at me about wanting to go to a gay bathouse. I didn't know what to say. If Bill O'Reilly wanted to go to a gay bathhouse, well, who was I to tell him he shouldn't?”

As if reflecting Savage's future recollection, O'Reilly continued: “If I want to pursue happiness in a gay bathhouse, shouldn't I be free to do that, Mr. Savage?”

Savage told O'Reilly that he was right and admitted that his urge to close gay bathhouses was inconsistent with his do-whatever-feels-good positions on drugs and sexual acts. “You win,” he said then, “but really,” he says now, “I was thinking, ‘Get me the hell away from this guy before he shouts
I want to go to a gay bathhouse
again!' Picturing gay men in a gay bathhouse is revolting enough, but picturing Bill O'Reilly in a gay bathhouse? That could put a gay guy off gay sex for the rest of his unnatural life.”

If the Make-a-Wish foundation were to grant O'Reilly's request, he would learn that in March 2004, a federally-funded study indicated that newly diagnosed HIV infections among bathhouse and sex club customers were twice as high as in the gay population and seven times higher among bathhouse patrons than in
the general population. In September, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a law that would require bathhouses to obtain a health certificate, which could be revoked if patrons are permitted to indulge in unprotected sex. Now, unannounced inspections during peak hours would be allowed.

No bathhouse owners testified against the rule, although Steve Afriat, a lobbyist hired to fight tougher regulation, said, “When you start regulating whether or not people can have safe sex, maybe one day you'll regulate whether people of the same sex can have sex with each other at all.” The Supreme Court's recent decision on sodomy has rendered that fear moot.

When San Francisco ordered its bathhouses shut down in 1984, angry activists demonstrated at City Hall, and the city's public health director received so many death threats that he wore a bullet-proof vest for the next few months. Unlike San Francisco, officials in Los Angeles allowed its bathhouses to remain open, but passed an ordinance requiring owners to instruct patrons in safe-sex practices, and to not only provide condoms, but also to make their use mandatory.

According to a Los Angeles County study, about 36 percent of respondents reported using drugs before going to gay bathhouses and sex clubs, which health officials say encourages unsafe behavior. Among the most widely used drugs are methamphetamine together with Viagra, a combination that loosens inhibitions and enables patrons to have sex repeatedly with different partners. One of the few gay leaders calling for more regulation is Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “The debate always seems to counterpoise civil liberties to public health,” he said. “But if you are earning money in a commercial establishment from creating a sex environment, then you should be required to make that environment as safe as possible, or you shouldn't be allowed to operate.”