My Gay Date With Attorney General Ashcroft: a log cabin Republican fantasy

By Andrew Tibbetts

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My cousin’s butcher is his brother’s golfing buddy, so it was only a matter of time before we’d meet. Everybody who knows any middle-aged gay guy is eagerly playing matchmaker in these post-Will-and-Grace days. I’ve been on dates with half the Bush administration. It’s a big country but a small country club.

I’d been told: he will want to go Karaoke-ing. I hate Karaoke. So it’s the first thing I say when he calls, "No Karaoke."

"Damn," he says, "Are you sure I can’t convert you? I go where you have to be good. We don’t let just anybody in."

"No Karaoke."

"Would you go to a concert?"

"Sure!"

"Well, what’s the difference?"

"The accompaniment, you Mondale! The background music to Karaoke is that crap saccharine goo with the synth strings and the cheesy living room organ percussion. It sets my teeth on edge."

"I never notice the background."

"To complicated political issues," I jokingly finish his sentence. He chuckles.

"Isn’t there anything else you like to do? I’m up for anything! Really, except Karaoke."

Who in their right mind takes a first date to picket abortion clinics? If he didn’t look so hot I would have left him on the sidewalk. He introduced me to his friends. They smelled. Maybe because they’d been out in the sun all day and were covered in spit.

"We’re not staying long," I whispered in his ear as he passed me a sign with a picture of a fetus on it.

"We’ll go after the first teen welfare mom bursts into tears and runs away," he promised.

Twenty minutes later we are in his car. The secret service guys wink at me from either side. I don’t get to sit beside him. But he contrives to fondle my ass by pretending to look for his seatbelt down the crack.

"Driver," he says, "the Gay Christian Rave on the double."

He looks over at me to see if I’m impressed. Tickets have been sold out for years. He can tell I’m pleasantly surprised and excited. He clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth and bobs his head from side to side. He sings, "I’m go-od, I’m go-od, I’m go-od." The secret service men bounce their heads to his infectious rhythm. I try to restrain myself. I have a small intestinal infection and don’t want to get too sexed up and find myself in the sack with him, and having to keep running to the toilet.

We have to check our shirts and pants in the lobby. He looks bearish, all hairy-backed and flabby in his underwear. Luckily the lights are dim, except when the searchlights cross your path.

"I know," he says, "I need to work out."

"You’re busy dismantling people’s civil rights," I say.

He chuckles. I chuckle back. We chuckle together.

He surveys the dance floor and says, "Usually when I want to see a bunch of hunky half-naked religious zealots, I have to weasel my way around the Geneva Convention to impound them at a military base."
He’s funnier than I thought he’d be and he can’t keep his hands off my butt. I thought of wearing double underwear so for all intents and purposes I look clean.

He yanks a couple of Gilligan hats and glow-in-the-dark necklaces out of his drawers. We accessorize. He spins me round and presses his body into my backside. We sway on the dance floor, gyrating in synch, drenched in sweat within a minute. I shaved my back so he keeps sliding off me. But I can tell he’s hard. I can measure a guy’s contract-with-America with my ass pretty accurately. He’s about seven and half. Don’t let anybody tell you that ain’t above average. Guys lie all the time about these things. Especially Democrats.

Suddenly he stops and whispers in my ear,

"I’m having a mild heart attack, do you mind if we call it a night?"

"And they say you don’t have one! Is it because you like me?"

"Damn right, baby, you are heart-stoppingly hot!"

I’m glad about this turn of events because I wasn’t sure how I was going to end up not sleeping with him the way things were going. Is there a hotter man in America these days?

He gets one of the secret service guys to take me home.

"Treat him right," he winks.

"Hey," I said, " I’ve been wanting to ask you something all night."

"Shoot."

"Is it true that on page three of "The Attorney General's Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations" it reads: ‘A terrorism enterprise investigation may be initiated when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that two or more persons are engaged in an enterprise for the purpose of . . . furthering political or social goals wholly or in part through activities that involve force or violence and a federal crime . . .’?"

"Yeah. So?" he says, suddenly not smiling.

"Aren’t the terms ‘reasonably’ and ‘wholly or in part’ insidiously malleable?" I ask.

There’s like a half a minute pause before we all crack up.

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Andrew Tibbetts lives, secretly, somewhere in Canada as part of the Karmic Protection Program. In all previous lives he has ended up married to Shirley MacLaine and is hoping to avoid that fate in this one. As a fat, poor, forty-year old gay man with flourishing nose hair he has so far not drawn her amorous attention. So far.