God, Gays and the John Deere Tractor

I'm not gay by anybody's standards. Not that I have a problem with that, my first book (A Matter of Tastes) is on a woman who comes out of the closet and it ruins her life.

It's what a lot of folks would consider tasteful. I mean, there's no explict sex -- certainly none with fish or animals.

The book taught me a lot about where I was born and bred... Spokane, Wash.

It's 2007 and we're watching moving pictures in Spokane in color. A couple of things shook me up a little lately.

Now I've seen the world. I've been to Post Falls, Libby and lived in Astoria for a while. None of these places have had a black mayor, let alone a gay one.

Recently we had a mayor here who was kicked out of the closet when he pissed off the local paper.

I mean, he wasn't doing it in his office with minors and stray cats anymore. The guy just went the wrong way. Granted he'd done it with Boy Scouts and orphans, but what politician hasn't?

He was fine until folks found out he was a little light in his loafers. He was fixing the streets and the city's budget looked a whole lot better than my checkbook.

There was really no reason to fire the guy, except for who or what he slept with. That bothered me. If most of us turned on the lights after a long, hard night in The Blue Banjo we'd probably be a little spooked by what woke up with.

But they did fire him. And turns out the guy died of (colon, honest) cancer a few months later. Nobody remembers that. They just laugh about the queer mayor in Spokane who got canned for swinging the wrong way. A couple of folks, I guess, look at broomsticks twice anymore.

Now why does that bother me?

Remember the novel I talked about earlier? I decided to walk down the street to do the dog and pony show. Writers do that. They pile up a bunch of books on a table and sign them if folks will buy them. In the meantime the paying customers can either swoon at the artist or get within spitting range.

Turns out I never got the chance. I walked down the way and found the store's owner. I've lived in the neighborhood for like 200 years and they just know me as the spooky-looking bum who stumbles by on the way to the ATM machine.

I introduced myself proper and had a couple of my books with me. The owner was just fine until the third or fourth sentence when I said the word "gay" somewhere in there.

She freaked. There were a couple of folks in the store and I'm sure they figured I was flashing her or something.

Her son was about nine-foot-two and used to be a professional wrestler. He came to protect his mamma and proceeded to introduce me to the curb. He threw my books after me and went back inside.

I got a chance to think about my hometown a little as I collected my spleen and headed home. I thought about how Spokane was trying to pass itself off as a cultural mecca and all, but there weren't a whole lot of blacks, Mexicans, or known homosexuals in the city government. I did hear, however that a half-black, half-Mexican homosexual woman with a Chinese layabout transexual boyfriend had applied to be Chief of Sanitation.

I think they turned her out because her Masters degree was from a mail-order printer in Montana. I also heard she was doing fine now as the deputy mayor of some town in Oregon.

We ALL know about Oregon.

I'll add there are a couple of other bookstores in town, and they won't carry ANY of my work because of this. They won't let me do signings or attend the moving pictures at the Garland Theater unless I sit way in the back. They'll take my money to get in. They'll sell me soda and popcorn. But I have to wait until everybody else sits down and the movie starts before I can get in.

I lost the first minutes of Bambi because of that. And it hurts.

It especially hurts when you realize you can buy my book in Oklahoma City, in New York, and in Easley, S.C., but you can't buy it in Spokane. Not even bootleg copies. It's on Amazon's bestseller list (something like 2,894,532 - but it's there).

I figured this would be a good place to whine because I can decide whose comments I can publish.

Oh, and my second book, Crimes Against Commerce? One of the guys is God. He drinks beer and drives a John Deere tractor. Haven't seen that one in town.

I guess it's because God is a Baptist.