A Day Late

If this doesn't churn your stomach, you have too keen a sense of irony or no soul. I can't imagine that there is middle ground on this one. I live in Kansas, which is no secret. This is my home and has been since shortly after my birth on a naval base in Chicago. I've lived in Kansas City, MO; Omaha, NE; Council Bluffs and Des Moines, IA; Elmhurst and Chicago, IL; and San Francisco. But Kansas has always been my home.

This red state that sports an Attorney General, Phill Kline, who is seeking to ferret out all sexually active teenagers via clinic subpoenas is also home to the most reviled American this side of the Bush cabal: Fred Phelps. I have some personal history with Fred. He's made national news over the years for a variety of his outrageous acts with regard to the picketing of funerals. Lately, he's a friggin' cause celebre. If you print a newspaper or air television news without mentioning this creep, you're just not doing your job, it would seem.

In 1990, I was an out, energetic, freshly-minted gay man with a chip on his shoulder and a Pentecostal ring in his voice. I made the campus radio station and a couple of TV news reports in connection with local violence against gay men. I had death threats left under the one functioning windshield wiper of my beat-up vehicle. I joined all-night vigils at the Chancellor's residence demanding a better life for gays on campus. Either to shut us up or because he really cared, Chancellor Gene Budig, at the time, appointed me to be the University of Kansas' first "Graduate Assistant for Gay and Lesbian Concerns" - the institution's liaison, if you will, to the gay community. The Chronicle of Higher Education had a blurb about me. The FBI investigated me as a suspect in a campus bomb threat I didn't make. ("No War for Big Oil" was the telephone call placed around the time of the first Bush's war in Iraq. The FBI clearly did not know my specialty was sodomy, not Sadaam.) I was something. I was proud, at least.

Not long after my appointment and shortly after I'd settled into the boiler room they'd cleared out for my desk, a typical Kansas storm blew into Lawrence. Lightning hit Hoch Auditorium, one of the older buildings on campus. It burned...to the ground. All that was salvageable was the brick facade. It was a spectacle for a few days as the embers smoldered and officials trudged through the rubble scratching their heads. And then there was The Fax.

Fred's weapon of choice in those days was The Fax. He would fire up his machine and send them to every media outlet from here to Kingdom Come. This particular time the subject was Hoch, God's Wrath, and me.

Me!

The rationale, if you could call it that, was that The State of Kansas had on its payroll an "avowed homosexual" (moi), ergo, God had heaved a lightning bolt at Hoch Auditorium as a biblical shot across the bow in what we now call "The Culture Wars". God evidently didn't know that a couple of high-placed administrators had dated me prior to my appointment. Or maybe I was just the 'Mo that broke the camel's back. Or maybe I was the only avowed homosexual who inspired lightning strikes. I like that one. Let's go with that. I didn't remember having taken any vows, but I was decidedly homosexual. I thought it would be interesting to write some homosexual vows for we, the avowed, but I never got around to it.

"I (State Your Name) do solemnly swear to wear only natural fibers, to maintain a gym membership for as long as I own tank tops and never to badmouth Judy, Liza or Barbra in the presence of heterosexuals. Amen."

Funny, we used to call it a Civil Rights Struggle. Now it's a "culture war" or "values issues". My, how times haven't changed all that much. Because there is a sense of humor that attends some reactions to Fred's antics, the Chancellor's assistant was dispatched to smuggle one of the first of the collapsed bricks for my keeping. (Seeing as how I was the reason for Hoch's demise, and all, it only seemed right, I was told.) The rest of the bricks would be sold off to alumni to raise funds for the rebuilding. I would come face-to-face with Fred's clan shortly thereafter.

I had one date with a young man named Gordon around that time. Gordon and I played on the same gay softball team. He was opera and china patterns. I was cigarettes and porn. He cooked Duck a l'Orange for dinner at his place and I discovered in one fell swoop that I cared for neither Duck a l'Orange nor Gordon, bless his heart. But it was a nice gesture. Gordon died shortly thereafter - the first person I'd known personally who died of AIDS. I didn't know he had it before he died. But the news made the rounds courtesy of some of his more intimate friends. Fred's family showed up at the little chapel on campus where Gordon's memorial service was held. Some of us threw up in the bushes from the combination of shock and disgust. I'd never heard of such a thing. Words do not adequately convey the feeling you have when a funeral is desecrated. You just have to be there. I'm quite surprised that someone better armed and less cowardly than myself hasn't taken these people out yet.

Comes now to the party a veritable Million Mensch March of media talking heads, legislators and common citizens who are outraged that the same desecration is being visited upon the funerals of those killed in military duty. The thinking goes that God Hates Fags ---> America has a tolerance level just shy of a genocidal tendency for gays -----> so God killed your soldier. The folks at the GRE might want to write that one down for next year's exam.

I have two words for the suddenly shocked throng: Fuck You. Where was your outrage when these people were doing their "God Hates Fags" shtick at our funerals? I'll tell you where it was -- nowhere to be found. Why? I'll tell you why. You may need to sit down for this if you're heterosexual because it's going to come as something of a shock.

They were clucking their tongues and snickering behind their hands when "God Hates Fags" was the sign at a fag's funeral. No legislation, no general outrage, no media specials featurning Ashleigh Banfield or Anderson Cooper when it was Randy Shilts or the boy in Laramie, Wyoming - Matthew Shepard - or Gordon, for that matter. Fine and dandy up until they picketed a marine's funeral. Stomach churning, indeed. But Fred and his family aren't the most disgusting figures in this nasty little dance.

That distinction is reserved for those who only just now have figured out that this guy is off-kilter and should be stopped. Their disgust rings rather hollow after 20 years. They're at least a day late.