OK, Groomer!
When “Groomer” really means “He who smelt it, dealt it.”
Despite the coarse and toxic cloud of hatred unleashed across our culture, inspiring the most ignorant and violent among us to proudly fly their true colors in florid and ever-frightening displays, it’s a sign of real progress that even those people can no longer be openly anti-gay if they still hope to remain in polite company. (As opposed to Q-Anon company.) Unfortunately, the base fear and persecution that underpins homophobia is now rocking out on a wild reunion tour, having found form in (and taken cover like a little bitch) beneath the cheap guise of “protecting the children.” Performative right-wingers now freely level the charge of “Groomer” toward opponents broadly, and toward transgender people and drag performers in particular. Recently, Tennessee governor Bill Lee signed a law that basically bans drag performance, built upon the specious assumption that the very existence of drag is harmful to children. Then, at CPAC—which has devolved into Lollapalooza for childish, belligerent fascists — Daily Wire host (and exceedingly punchable face owner) Michael Knowles called for “the eradication of Transgenderism,” which didn’t sound any less horrendous in its original German.
Only I’m less surprised by how 1930s-ish it’s getting out there than by the nakedness of the “Projection” on the part of these horrid people. Our last president was (and still is) HUGE into Projection and if you’re new to this psychological term, it’s really just a fancy word for “He who smelt it, dealt it.” You express (and cover over) whatever you hate in yourself by calling someone else that thing. And so Trump called Rosie O’Donnell a fat pig; Hillary is crooked; the election is rigged. Once you understand the mechanics of Projection, you realize that every time that crooked, fat pig (who totally tried to steal an election) opens his mouth, he tips his hand. And so do the rest of these knuckle-dragging opportunists now crying Groomer.
Nevertheless, Groomers ARE out there. They do pose a clear and present danger to children and they always have. In fact, I’d like to tell you about a time when my mom, Jacqueline, shielded me from their potential harm.
I was raised Catholic and we went to mass every week but I never felt so present in the pew as I was when we watched, as a family, The Dukes of Hazzard, which aired at 9 pm on Friday night on CBS. (Right after Bill Bixby inflated into Lou Ferrigno on The Incredible Hulk.) VCRs were not yet a thing, and so you literally had to be there. There was no rewinding. There was no rewatching. There was only racing to the bathroom and kitchen during commercial breaks, and so once Waylon Jennings’ intro to “Good Ol’ Boys” cued the opening sequence, I sat there as present as a meditating yogi. I loved watching Luke Duke fire an arrow into Roscoe P. Coltrane’s car tire, and it was during that brief, ripe moment — when I had just begun to sense my boy adventure, but still had no interest in girls — that I thought that I might like to become a priest. It seemed like the easiest job in show business. Aside from only working weekends, you were further given a place to live, a car to drive, and you got to go to all of the sporting events. I even sized myself up against them, thinking that I could knock out a wittier and more poignant homily. (In retrospect, this might have been the first time that I ever felt the requisite arrogance to be a writer.) Anyway, I figured I might first become an altar boy, and I expressed my interest to my parents.
“We go away in the summer so you can’t,” my mom said.
My father, Frank, said nothing.
And that was that.
NOW! It’s entirely possible that spending our summers in the Poconos did drive my mom’s calculus, but it’s not like Father Pryor needed boys to sign a twelve-month contract. I’m pretty sure I could have become an altar boy, gone away for the summer, and then resumed my duties in the fall. But the swiftness with which my mom shut it down makes me wonder if something else were at play. Because the first order of business for any mom is to feed and protect you. And even though this was decades before the abuse scandals broke, my mom (as I later learned) was never snowed by this retrograde institution that still considers and treats women as second-class citizens. (While unchivalrously inviting them to do much of the heavy lifting.) So it’s hard not to wonder if some hard-wired instinct — perhaps unconsciously — prevented her from exposing one of her little lambs to those Gabardined wolves. Then, by the time The Dukes of Hazzard was in its second season, the sound of Waylon Jennings didn’t send me rushing back to the edge of the couch to catch Tom Wopat so much as I wanted to be sitting up and present for those precious seconds of preening at Catherine Bach as Daisy Duke, standing in the middle of the road in her pink bikini.
By then I understood that being a Catholic priest was a shit deal.
And I’m glad that my mom (who, to her credit, also harrumphed over the Confederate flag on the roof of the General Lee) cockblocked me from ever becoming an altar boy. That was a Great Moment in Mothering, particularly as we now know that disturbing percentages of predator priests and pastors (and youth pastors!) are lurking out there, actively grooming vulnerable kids for abuse.
Still, I begrudgingly admire the shrewdness of these people now crying Groomer because it feels like they managed to harness the batshit-insane energy of Q-Anon — thankfully still the domain of far-gone, Trump cultists — and then laundered Q-Anon’s outlandish fantasies of child-sacrificing Illuminati into the more polite and digestible concept of “Groomers.” Meanwhile, doing this further distracts the rest of us from the systemic child abuse still unfolding behind the closed doors of countless congregations.
(Also, in the tipping-their-hands department, anyone who puts forth the concept that kids could be groomed to be gay might be showing us who they really are. I’m hardly an authority on such matters, but I’m guessing that cock — quite unlike goat cheese or martinis — is not an acquired taste. But I’ll defer to Tennessee Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally.)
Meanwhile, no child has ever once been raped at a drag queen story hour, while the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Church and the United Methodist Church (among others) have respectively proven themselves to be veritable child sex-abuse factories. And these free-loading institutions — that you and I underwrite with our taxes — are doing everything in their power to distract us while they continue to enable their systemic perpetration of The Worst Thing That There Is.
In New York, where I live, a stupid-ass law forbids a liquor license from being issued within 200 feet of a school. This is based on another durable pile of bullshit that children are somehow routinely raped in bars. This is SO not a thing. And it never was. And if we really wanted to protect children, we’d give them health care. We’d also forbid any Catholic Church from operating within 200 feet of a school. Because the first group of people we should protect children from, statistically, are the sexual predators who present themselves as Men of God. (By the way, we could protect scores of children tomorrow if we just criminally prosecuted any member of any church who doesn’t immediately notify law enforcement upon learning of abuse.)
As the saying goes, “The first step is admitting that THESE PEOPLE ARE THE REAL FUCKING PROBLEM!” Because there are men in dresses preying upon your children — but they’re not reading books to them in the library, or cheekily performing at your local brunch spot — they’re up on the altar. Praying. And preying.
You long-standing readers might understand why I take this personally. More than my own forays into drag, however, I’ve gotten to know many dedicated drag performers and the critical and expressive role that drag continues to play in their lives. Most people now know at least one gay person — but they might not know a drag performer or a transgender person, which makes them ripe targets to be bullied and demonized while further distracting from the widespread and systemic child abuse unfolding in churches. This is our American perversion. And it stinks all the way to Hell.
Speaking of which, Dante once said that “The hottest circle in Hell is reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” It’s time to stand up and vociferously reject this utter bullshit. Because so long as we continue to collectively filter Morality through Religion, those Good Ol’ Boy Groomers are going to keep preying upon defenseless children. For as Waylon Jennings sang, “Someday the mountain might get ’em, but the law never will.”
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