Remember When America Used to Be Great?

The following experience dates from 1987 or 1988 when I was in San Francisco on business and by the end of the week was sick of the same crummy meals every night at the Marriott Hotel.

So, I asked the last customer whom I saw that day to recommend where I could eat some kind of ‘home-cooked’ meal, without actually having to be a guest in someone’s home.

This guy told me to go to the Gay & Lesbian Synagogue in the Castro District where they had a big, buffet after the brief Sabbath service on Friday night.

“Everyone competes with everyone else to make the best food,” he told me, and he turned out to be absolutely correct.

The buffet was overflowing with tasty this and tasty that, and at some point, as I was chomping down meatballs and something-or-other a guy my age (I was in my 40’s) came up, said ‘hello’ and obviously wanted to see if I was interested in some talk and then who knows what?

I immediately knew from this guy’s accent that he, like me, was from New York. So, after I made it pleasantly clear that I had come out to the Castro only for the food but not for a date, I asked him how he ended up on the West Coast and this is what he said: “My parents are religious, and I knew by the time I finished high school that it would break their hearts if I told them I was gay. So, I moved out to San Francisco, got a job, and go home once a year for the holidays, and if anyone suspects anything, they don’t ask, and I don’t say.”

I think about this guy from time to time and I wonder how many millions of men and women gave up family, friends, careers, and hometown comforts because admitting to a non-traditional sexual orientation used to be a big, fuck*ing deal.

I don’t think the transgender community has felt as threatened in the last decade as the gay community felt threatened before we began to accept the homosexual orientation and lifestyle when (thanks to Anthony Fauci) we finally began to understand AIDS. But I’m not sure if I’m right.

What I do know is that being against the transgender lifestyle has become a way for a few putzes to deflect critical attention from how they have behaved about things that are much more important than whether the person in the toilet stall next to me is a guy or a girl.

Take, for example (and you take him because I don’t want him) the disgraceful behavior of Brett Favre, who appears to have helped promote a scam which used government welfare funds to build a new volleyball facility on the college campus where both he and his daughter went to school.

This incident was part of a scandal involving the misuse of $77 million in federal welfare funds, which Favre claims he had no awareness of the problem at all, but meanwhile he made a point of telling one of the individuals who directed the monies to the volleyball facility to make sure that his name wasn’t mentioned as having played any role in the transfer of funds.

Of course, the moment that Favre’s name came up in stories about this scam, he immediately got himself on some alt-right podcast and gave an endorsement to – who else? – Donald Trump.

The good news is that we can now add Favre’s name to all those other patriots – Giuliani, Cohen, Bannon, Kelly, Manafort – who have been the foremost supporters of Trump, along with the thousand or so assholes who have been indicted for ‘touring’ the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

I’m willing to take the shot odds that if somehow Trump could steal enough votes to be elected in 2024, the first thing he would do would be to tell the United States Postal Service to issue a January 6th commemorative stamp.

Think I’m kidding? Actually, I’m not. This is a guy who went on national TV last week and claimed that he ‘finished’ the Mexican wall. In fact, he completed exactly 58 miles of new wall and repaired 458 miles of walls and other barriers which were already in place. There are still 280 miles of open range along the border where no construction has been done at all.

Trump’s a serial liar. We all know that. Now Trump’s found another liar to be a supporter in the person of Brett Favre. Both Trump and Favre would like it if the transgender community was forced to tell lies about themselves in the way that so many unfortunate gay men and women had to lie in days when America was ‘great.’

Want America to become ‘great’ again?