I wanna be a gay wingnut

San Francisco has its share of wingnuts – questionably sane people who feel compelled to bring their offbeat beliefs to a public forum. The guy who holds a sign saying aliens want to impeach the president (it used to read Clinton, then Bush, now Van Buren), the guy who says the Dalai Lama's a cannibal, the guy with the van covered with information saying Stephen King killed John Lennon.

I want to bring my beliefs to gay people like that, whether they want to hear or not. They’ve driven me that crazy.

I'm going to make big signs with my slogans (DISCO CAUSES BRAIN CANCER – BAN GAY CLONING – GOING TO THE GYM MEANS LESS TIME FOR ART). I'll make badly typewritten manifestos, with odd diagrams in the corners, a bullhorn to announce my rants beneath the large rainbow flag in the Castro. I want
to cultivate a wild-eyed stare, an uncomfortable manner, and bad body odor. I want to fax newspapers my letters full of my crackpot theories.

Either by force, or by disguising myself as a spandex and mirrorshades DJ with a crate of records, I barricade myself in the DJ booth of San Francisco’s biggest and most vacuous disco.

Hordes of drugged out mindless gymboys gyrate to whatever's still spinning on the turntable, not a thought in their heads.

I pull the plug, and the record shows down – eeeer – thud – thud – thud...

They come halfway out of their trance, looking confused, like zombies in a horror film after the zombie master dies.

Hah! But I am the new zombie master. My voice echoes out loud over the speakers, booms from the giant woofers designed to shake bowels and numb brains. And this is what I say, in a voice colored with overweening self-righteousness:

"For too long you have escaped responsibility, escaped meaning, escaped culture, escaped everything that ought to bring purpose to existence, instead filling yourselves with drugs, pointless sex, the gym, music with all the complexity of a car alarm, and the ceaseless worship of your own vanity. But I am now holding up a mirror not to your faces, but to your souls. The circuit party is like the repetitive track worn by Shetlands shackled to the cross-arms of a county fair pony ride."

"For too long a tiny cadre of activists has worked to fight injustice without your help. For too long, a loyal audience has supported live performance while you were a slave to canned rhythm. It’s time for you to do your part."

But I know it’s futile. Their minds are as well-barricaded as Fort Knox, and only hitting some sort of cultural rock bottom will ever bring them out of it. I just can’t offer sufficiently shocking therapy.

Larry-bob lives in San Francisco and holds forth on the website www.holytitclamps.com