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That'll show me! Fan MailBy Rick Horowitz
The signature was a felt-tipped scrawl, illegible. There was, of course, no return address. "Last Friday I was channel surfing and happened upon your lisping comedy routine on the Channel 10 program, InterCHANGE. You sure are a clever fellow, Nancy-Boy. Where else can the viewing public see a fidgety weasel with a nervous tick delivering ill-informed, sneering and snarling smart-ass wise-cracks fronting as enlightened political commentary? Thank God for public television!!" I never realized I had a tick. What had sent my correspondent oozing to his keyboard was a 120-second consideration of the latest news from Iraq, delivered for my local public TV station, where I'm a weekly contributor to a long-running public-affairs show. Wasn't it reassuring, I had suggested in this particular piece, that the war was proceeding exactly as the president -- and the vice president, and the secretary of defense -- had always predicted? Everything just hunky-dory, with no complications or unpleasant surprises, and right on schedule, too! My tongue, needless to say, was lodged firmly in my cheek. (Maybe that's why he thought I was lisping.) My correspondent was -- how should I put it? -- unamused.
"Hey, Nancy-Boy! What are the ratings for that half-hour of pseudo-intellectual preening?" "What's wrong with you Nancy-Boy, don't you like America?" "Hey, Nancy-Boy! In World War II, the Japs had Tokyo Rose. You could be Najaf Nancy." And so on. The letter had nine paragraphs. "Nancy-Boy" was in eight of them. I was intrigued. Intrigued that my correspondent, apparently driven to total, mouth-foaming outrage by my two little minutes of opinion and determined to knock me down, to put me in my place, had reached for the absolute worst thing he could think of to throw at me -- the insult to end all insults -- and had come up with this: I was gay. Horrors. "Hey, Nancy-Boy! I'll bet you intentionally pursue every imaginable negative position when dealing with a complex issue of vital national security like terrorism, always managing to find something to whimper about." My correspondent had sent copies of the letter -- or so the letter claimed -- to two of the city's leading right-wing talk-radio hosts. Maybe he thought they'd get a kick out of it, reading his witty put-downs. Maybe he even hoped they'd read his letter on the air, so that everybody -- or at least everybody whose approval he really cared about -- would know what a clever guy he is. Of course, since he'd made sure his name was unreadable and his address invisible, they wouldn't know exactly who he is. He wouldn't get all the credit he deserved. But he'd know, and he could feel proud of himself, even if his unassailable manliness didn't quite extend to actually identifying himself. "Hey, Nancy-Boy, I have an idea. How about sending a demo tape of your schtick to al-Jazeera? I'll bet they'd find your routine really clever too....Only you shouldn't tell them that you like to play hide-the-Johnson with 12 year old boys. That probably wouldn't go over very well." My correspondent never did explain how my being gay would invalidate my views on the war in Iraq, would make the fighting less lethal or the damage to America's reputation less worrisome. If I were gay, the war would still be tumbling out of control. The terrorists would still be signing up new recruits by the hundreds. But if I were gay -- I'm not, but so what? -- I guess we could ignore all that. "Hey, Nancy-Boy, you might need a partner on al-Jazeera, kinda like Regis has Kelli, you know. I understand that Janeane Garofalo might be looking for work soon. She can be Regis and you can be Kelli." Posted 5/25/04. Get
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Rick Horowitz
