Far From Flaming

There’s been a great deal of brouhaha back in the USA this past week about the alleged effeminacy of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus, who turns gays into straights for a living, and who shares candidate Bachmann’s opposition to what the gay agendists call the marriage equality movement, but what their right-thinking procreating neighbors call a brazen attempt to set the stage for the legalization of bestiality, polygamy, and selling pubescent white virgins to producers of XXX-rated videos featuring heterosexual anal intercourse, which isn’t that much less distasteful than the gay kind when you think about it, or even if, like I, you refuse to be made to think about it.

If Marc’s sibilants are a little mushier than they might be, and if he swings his hips when walking in a way that wouldn’t be prudent in the locker room of a minor league hockey team, for instance, it must be that he’s unconsciously copied some of the affectations (and never imagine that they're anything other than affectations!) of the so-called gays he’s reclaimed for Christ over the decades. I knew him in the mid-90s, when we were both graduate students at the Bob Wandel College of Theology and Xenophobia in Topeka, and he was absolutely incombustible, or whatever word you might prefer to describe someone as far from flaming as a human being can be. He was an avid fan of the Kansas City Chiefs professional football team, and typically snacked on beef jerky and handfuls of turf he would rip out of local ball fields, which he facetiously called "salad". He didn’t have just one subscription to Hustler Outtakes, but two, and was a VIP card holder at the Fallen Women topless bar out on Kismet Blvd. He intimated that he’d had over 1300 women, and that when he’d been the captain of his high school wrestling and hunting teams, he’d had to have his jockstraps custom-made because even the biggest ones one could buy off the rack, if that’s the word, couldn’t contain him.

Cynics, of course, might interpret all of this as an attempt to conceal his perversity beneath a veneer of hypermasculinity, but how are they going to explain away my unsuccessful attempt to seduce him on Halloween Night, 1996, during the height of my own experimentation with bisexuality? He gave me a lift home from the costume party we’d both attended, he as Chuck Norris and I as Elvira. I asked him up for a cup of coffee, and he accepted because he’d been hitting the Coors pretty hard and needed to pee. While he was in the bathroom, I slipped into the marabou-trimmed baby doll in which I’d modeled earlier in the month for Midwestern Transvestite, put 500 miligrams of Rohypnol into his coffee, and assumed the pose on the living room sofa that had made it necessary for the MT photographer, a father of four and stepfather of one, to take what he euphemistically referred to as a cigarette break. Marcus, though, couldn’t have been less interested if I’d been old man Wandel himself.