Mitt Romney’s Homosexual Panic

First things first: you don’t have to be a shrink to know that no-one bullies homosexuals unless they’re tormented by their own homosexuality, active or suppressed.   Any physical attack on a “gay” man is de facto rape.  All that’s required to understand that basic fact is four years of  high school or two years in the military.  Mitt Romney’s serial “pranks,” like the gang-bang attack he led on a gay student while in prep-school at Cranston—Cranston!  how the name itself reeks of fey weakness and upper-class entitlement!—speak loudly to his own deep sexual confusion.  Who the hell seeks the help of a “champion wrestler”—gay-bells ringin’, are you listenin’—to pin the gay student to the ground while “viciously” hacking away at the helpless boy’s long blonde hair with a pair of scissors?  Who DOES such a thing?

Well, a guy like Mitt Romney, about whom a certain rapper—who bears a striking resemblance to myself–wrote this verse: “You don’t think I’m hard, I’m’a show you the proof—I put the muthafuckin’ dog on the damn car roof!  You think my sons are weird, I’ll tell ya why that’s true—I stuck their little bitty asses on the car roof too!”  In any case, a deeply sick man.

Romney’s obvious attempt to “castrate” Jonathan Tauber, the gay student, haunted the poor man for the rest of his life.  But Romney claims not to even remember it—denial, anyone?  Then, in classic Romney style, he makes his original lie exponentially worse for himself by amping it up with a second, even more laughable lie:  “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case…”

Lie.  Stone lie.  I’m not that much younger than Mitt Romney, and I can testify that, like teenagers since the beginning of time—or, as Romney would say, for 6,000 years—we had powerful hunches about which of our peers was gay.  No doubt most of those guesses were hilariously wrong.  But in rural New York, we definitely would’ve pegged a certain Willard “Mitt” Romney as a “faggot,” to use the offensive parlance of the day.  And, to this day,  Romney speaks in a prissy, dare I say tight-assed, way; he wears mommy-jeans, with “magic underwear” beneath them, and folds back his shirtsleeves with a fussy precision; he spends hours at the hairdresser dyeing his stylized locks; he seems wildly uneasy in the presence of his wife; he doesn’t like sports, only the owners of sports-teams; and…his name is Willard.

And of course as soon as the world saw that he’d hired a gay man as a policy advisor he insisted on firing him, lest…lest what, exactly?

Whatever Mitt Romney’s true sexual orientation, America is prepared to accept him for who he is.  But first he needs to make peace with himself–and stop trivializing his attacks on gays  by calling them “pranks.”  Once he’s done that, we can all move on.

And then we’ll get to the subject of Michelle Bachman’s husband.

John Eskow is a writer and musician. He wrote or co-wrote the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac, as well as the novel Smokestack Lightning. He can be reached at: johneskow@yahoo.com

 

 

 

John Eskow is a writer and musician. He wrote or co-wrote the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac, as well as the novel Smokestack Lightning. He is a contributor to Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence. He can be reached at: johneskow@yahoo.com