The GULLY | Gay Mundo | Keeping Company with the Devils

JUNE 23, 2000. Is it the tap water? An airborne brain-eating mold? Are they slipping vodka into their Florida orange juice like I do? In these quasi (and queasy)-post-Elian days, The Miami Herald is always a quick trip to Bizarro World.

I gotta admit, I wasn't entirely surprised to see that in the land of Anita Bryant, the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), and the other Bush brother, some of the inhabitants take out their sun-crazed bigotry even on the dogs.

poodle head I feel sorry for the poor dead poodle, General Lee. He was only trying to get it off with the Jack Russell terrier Bandit, though there wasn't much chance of the South rising again for the already neutered General. Genitalia didn't matter either to George Stephens Finley, who beat the secessionist hero dog with a vacuum cleaner handle, then bashed the poor thing against a tree—probably a magnolia.

What I want to know is could George fag-hating-turd Finley be prosecuted under the new prospective federal hate crimes legislation that, in another bizarro twist, I predict civil libertarians, professional queers of color, and Florida redneck Republicans will all hate?

Hating the Hate Crimes Law
The libs hate it because you shouldn't be prosecuted for what you're thinking as you felonize, the p.q.c's, because they're sure the racist judicial system will use it as one more strike against their (homophobic through no fault of their own) het brothers of color, and the Republicans, well, because they just don't like to sign off on anything that has "gay" in it, unless it's got the word "no" in front of it. No gay marriage, no gay civil rights, no gay lives.

It's just intellectualizing on all sides if you ask me, until the cops actually start outdoing themselves in tracking down gay-bashers, dyke-baiters, murderers and the like. Right now, in the unlikely event they look for and find the culprit, you have to do some serious arm-twisting before the pigs classify something as a hate crime. "Why", says Officer Bob, "everybody uses the word fag now and then. It don't mean a thing."

And as to applying the law selectively, a lot will come down to whether the cops are more racist, or more homophobic. Hateful perps of color and white cops may find themselves bonding over their bruised knuckles. Hard to tell.

Strange Bedfellows
Homophobia often sprouts strange bedfellows—like the racist, anti-immigrant far right whites and the Latino homophobes in California. It was really something to see that victorious little rainbow coalition bonding together against queers, and defending heterosexual marriage in the recent Proposition 22.

I imagine even hard-line Miami anti-Castroites secretly cheered on the Bearded one when he was putting us in concentration camps in the 60's, or frying our brains in mental institutions. He's at least somewhat modified his stance there. Right-wing Cuban Americans haven't. Their second favorite curse word, after "Commie", for anyone who disagrees with them, or just wants to hear Cuban musicians like Los Van Van, is "maricón", which is even more loathsome than faggot, and usually comes with a thick wad of spit, a brick, or a boycott.

Miami's Cuban exiles need more than an ad blitz on Cuba's vices to distract us from their so-called "image problem". A "Human Rights in Cuba" campaign I'd understand, but vice? Has Cuba been wearing short skirts again? Hanging out in the wrong part of the Caribbean? Is it the company she keeps? Her questionable language? It's easier for the Cuban exiles to speak of vice, than for the exile pot to denounce the Castro kettle when it comes to human rights.

Imagining Things
fenced elian "Image problem", is what CANF calls the backlash against their stealing Elian Gonzalez from his father because of the man's politics, not to mention their decades of shutting up the opposition with threats, blackmail, bombs, and dollars. I call it geopolitical delusion, as in, they think they're in a banana republic. Maybe they are.

It would explain why the Miami banana machine has stuck with the Elian case for seven long months despite loss after loss. Just today, their hopes were soundly thrashed for a re-hearing in the Atlanta court which had already dismissed their specious arguments. Nevertheless, they'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court. The politicos still have a few more Cuban-American votes to milk. The lawyers have electoral, or Warholian, ambitions, and there are one or two more Miami shark lawyers who haven't had time to get in on the feeding frenzy.

The Miami relatives have to persist, because after all, they've been bought: someone has been paying for their rent, their new clothes, and their lawyers, and now that special someone has also bought them a nice house.

I almost feel sorry for those small Miami Gonzalez bananas. Like the dead poodle General Lee, they are impotent, doomed symbols in an ignorant, stupid war.