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Gay Marriage, GOP Secret Weapon
Was the "moral value" of homophobia this election’s X-factor?

My colleague Ann and I decided to tune out of the election coverage around 1:30 am. We left the friends with whom we’d been watching to walk to the F train the long way, crosstown and down Sixth Avenue through Greenwich Village. At W. 4th, a man staggered toward us from across the street. He looked drunk; he was dirty; and he wore an American flag t-shirt that didn’t come close to covering his belly.

“Admit it, Democrat,” he bellowed, closing fast. “Bush won!” He shook a fist at us. “And now I’m gonna shove my whole f-----g fist up your Democrat ass!”

I had two inches on the guy. Ann, half a foot shorter than me and probably half as heavy, knows karate. We figured we could protect our unaffiliated asses. The real puzzle was, Why did this man think we were Democrats? And what was with the weirdly homoerotic anger? There’s something about threatening to shove your “whole fist” up an ass that suggests a certain familiarity with the sexual practice of fisting and its challenges.

We thought about it while we waited for the F train. Ann, as it happens, had voted for Kerry. Since I didn’t vote -- my registration is two or three apartments behind me -- I don’t need to say who I would’ve voted for if I had. We inspected our clothing: Ann looked sharp in a neat black outfit and short, bright red hair. I felt stylistically nonpartisan in jeans and a sweatshirt. Both of our bellies, however, were fully covered, unlike the fister’s. That fact, apparently, revealed both our political and sexual proclivities.

At first, we didn't make much of the man's warning. After all, it’s easy to imagine that had the election gone differently, and had we been in, say, Dallas, a bare-bellied Kerry supporter might have likewise threatened a fisting.

Or maybe not. Homophobia is a cross-party persuasion, but last night it figured most often in the votes of Republicans. A topic discussed more and more frequently as the pundits came to realize that their predictions had been wildly wrong was “values” -- that is, in this election like no other, gay marriage. Let’s make that simpler, get to the root of the matter: gay sex. Gay sex in all its variety -- including fisting -- may have been this election’s X-factor. Bush is against it. Kerry would rather leave the details to the discretion of lovers.

The clearest evidence of homosexuality as an organizing principle in last night’s voting is the fact that all eleven of the state gay marriage bans proposed passed. The proposals may not have been so much populist as political from conception, designed by GOP strategists to drive otherwise lazy, Republican-leaning voters to the polls. Given the accounts of fraudulent phone calls “campaigning” for Kerry’s promise to legalize gay marriage (a promise he never made; like Bush, he’s for civil unions), that’s not a hard story to swallow. ...