SEXIS WRONG

Queer Freaks
Why Legalized Sodomy Is Just Political Foreplay
Patrick Califia
In June 2003, when the Supreme Court decided, in Lawrence
v. Texas, to decriminalize sex acts that people have been doing
ever since they had genitals and other orifices, I was as
happy as any other AmeriKKKan queer. San Francisco’s gay
pride parade followed soon after, and the city was full of delirious
fags and dykes, bisexual (speak it under your breath)
men and women, and even those do-they-have-to-be-so-obvious
transgendered people (“Well, you can’t call them men
or women, can you?” say the gym-toned gay Democrats and
the lesbian soccer moms), celebrating the good sense of our
highest court. All of them far too stoned to follow such a long
sentence. Like Nancy Reagan, I just get high on life. Maybe
I’ll be named the next Drug Czar. Anything’s possible now
that I’m no longer a sex offender.
Frankly, I didn’t think I would live long enough to see this
much sexual sanity in the United States of Gunpowder and
the Indian reservations it made possible. Especially not under
the reign of failed energy magnate George
W. Bush. Maybe the Supremes felt that they
owed us something for letting Bush steal the
election? My dance of gratitude falters, because
I very much fucking doubt it. While the
rest of you laugh at Dubya for not being able
to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
I will fortify myself with a Frappuccino from
the Sodomites’ Starbucks at 18 th and Castro, and hope this
should-be-bankrupt dude-ranch cowboy will have an equally
difficult time finding our very own WMD. How do you say
“Put down the red telephone” in Korean?
Bitter, table for one! Or two, since you’re here now. Stick
around, I’ve already ordered for both of us. Service is slow,
which is odd when you think about how many self-proclaimed
bottoms there are in this town, so let me throw out a few conversation
stoppers while we’re all chipper enough to deserve
a chewing out.
I’m a queer freak. I’m a promiscuous, bisexual, female-tomale
transsexual, and a sadomasochist. Do you mind if I
grope your ass, lick your ear, and whisper, “Since my dick
isn’t long enough to go up somebody’s ass, is it at all helpful
to me to know assfucking is now as legal as taking fertility
drugs to conceive a litter of Southern Baptists?” Here’s my
next question. If you’ve been accused of witchcraft by your
Puritan neighbors, and they hang you, does it really matter a
lot if one of them doesn’t watch so he can take a discreet leak
on your pansies? Is that a breath of fresh air? Is that freedom?
No, of course not, and I don’t feel particularly free if I’m told
that there’s nothing illegal about my sex life yet I’m still not allowed
to get married, serve in the military, or partake of other
dubious heterosexual privileges. We aren’t even at the point
of being “separate but equal.”
Frankly, I didn’t think I would live
long enough to see this much
sexual sanity in the United States
of Gunpowder and the Indian
reservations it made possible.
Despite a long overdue Supreme Court verdict in favor of sexual
privacy, the public policy in America and other Western
countries remains hostile toward gay, bisexual, and transgendered
people and folks of any sexual orientation who pursue
consensual but nonstandard forms of pleasure and intimacy.
Like outsiders in a Puritan village, we are still vulnerable to
prosecution and persecution. One of the problems with assimilationist
politics is its short-sighted view of what should
be on the queer political agenda. The most privileged among
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