Rat Rage The biggest LGBT story of this cycle had to be the marriage of Mr. Ratburn to another “man” on the animated PBS show Arthur. Launched in 1996, Arthur is the longest-running kid’s cartoon on TV, and Mr. Ratburn, a rat, is the 
longtime schoolteacher. The wedding was a lovely affair, good times had by all, and, yes, an important moment in the annals of children’s television. But then came the inevitable “response” from the religious Right, which used an outfit called One Million Moms to issue a fairly standard statement of outrage, which was picked up by those media outlets that get outraged by this kind of thing. The strategy of putting forward a group called One Million Moms probably made sense, but let there be no mistake: this is a front group for the American Family Association, which is officially listed as a hate group. For the record, the AFA puts out a magazine with 182,000 paid subscribers, so already the numbers are never going to add up. But even if there were a million moms opposed to the Arthur marriage, there are around 25 million mothers with school-aged children in the U.S., which leaves 24 million who are okay with Mr. Ratburn’s marital status.
Never Can Say Goodbye We hinted in last issue’s BTW that this would be our last waltz with former U.S. Congressman Aaron Schock (R–Illinois). So we lied! Aaron is back in the news, and in a way that shows how much he doesn’t want to be forgotten. 
Looking as buff as ever, there he is posing with his buddies at some big event. Or is he? After the publicity photo for the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival (in Indio, CA) had been widely posted on-line, two of the men pictured came forward to disavow any association with the fallen Congressman. One of them explained that Schock was “someone we just met” who wanted “to include himself in the photo,” so they let him in to be polite. But once they learned who it was, they were horrified and posted a lengthy apologia (in part): “Rob and I have been out since we were fourteen and fifteen, respectively, and living as proud gay men in a loving relationship. We are entirely against Aaron Schock’s values, views and actions.” And it’s true: Schock is still officially straight and has never repudiated his anti-gay record in the House. He may have beaten that legal rap (see past BTW’s), but his social standing took a big hit, so now he’s reduced to photo-bombing group shots of hot guys who are total strangers at rock music festivals. Next!
Pay Day for a Pool Boy Attendant He was the most virulent, and effective, purveyor of anti-gay hatred of his generation: Jerry Falwell’s legacies include a mega-church in Lynchburg, Virginia, a university (Liberty U.), and a son who bears his name. Jerry Falwell Jr. took over as president of Liberty U. and, like his dad, he’s a biggie in right-wing politics. So, when he needed someone to save his hide, he went right to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. The scandal broke when Reuters uncovered a taped conversation between Cohen and the actor Tom Arnold in which Cohen reveals that Falwell approached him for help with “an embarrassing personal matter” involving “racy photos” of him, his wife, and their twenty-something pool boy, Giancarlo Granda. Describing the photos as “terrible,” Cohen states that their owner was demanding $1.8 million to destroy them. Soon after that, Jerry Falwell Jr. loaned Granda the sum of $1.8 million ostensibly for his pool business. Granda has denied that he has the photos—which would of course be true if, say, he had been paid to trash them. A little digging by Politico revealed that Granda has been involved with the Falwells since 2012, when Jerry and his wife met him poolside at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. For the next several years, the Falwells would fly Granda around with them in their private jet, and they even bought property together in Miami. As of press time, Falwell was lawyering up, while Granda seemed to be taking it all in stride but wished the media would stop referring to him as a “pool boy”; he prefers “pool attendant.”
Paranoia Strikes Deep In an extraordinary rant, right-wing YouTuber Brenden Dilley took on a U.S. Congressman and exposed a curious feature of the zeitgeist. But first: meet Brian Sims, an openly gay U.S. House member from Pennsylvania, a gay rights activist who’s married to Brandon McMullin. Dilley’s obscenity-laced tirade boils down to a charge that Sims is only pretending to be gay for his own nefarious purposes. Dilley posits various motives for Sims’ charade: to gain media attention; to provide a cover for his bad behavior in public; or even, he hints, to get away with sexually harassing women. The zaniness of this claim is such that it might have been issued from a padded cell. And yet, Dilley has a large following that’s apparently prepared to take him seriously, however obvious the absurdity. (As in: Seriously? Coming out as gay when you’re running for office is about the riskiest thing you can do!) To understand the logic that could lead to this assertion, you have to dig into the mindset that has taken hold in this age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter—indeed the very one that gave us Donald Trump. It’s rooted in a fear that the traditional sources of power and privilege are slowly slipping away, which could only be happening because blacks and women and gays are using their minority status to jump ahead in the line in a world whose natural masters are none other than straight white men.
No Quick Brown Fox The New York Times reported that an animal breeder in China was arrested for giving his two “sleeping, thieving dogs” the names “City Officer” and “Traffic Warden.” The man, identified as Mr. Ban, was taken into custody and 
sentenced to ten days’ detention for insulting the police. It seems these civil servants are quite unpopular in China, where their image closely resembles that of Mr. Ban’s good-for-nothing dogs. Okay, so there isn’t anything “gay” about this story, and yet… There’s something so irreducibly, cross-culturally “camp” about this gesture. Of course, there’s another level of camp that could have taken it over the top, but naming the dogs “Miss City Officer” and “Lady Traffic Warden” would probably have gotten Mr. Ban even more time in the pokey.
