I am old enough to remember 2000, when writing icon Dan Savage infiltrated the Gary Bauer campaign for president.
Bauer spent most of his campaign hating on the ghey, and Savage decided to unleash his not inconsiderable journalist powers against this.
And then he got a wicked bad case of the flu, and, making the best out a bad situation, wrote about licking the door knobs at Bauer campaign HQ to spread the “love”.
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Pretending you feel fine when you’ve got the flu is exhausting — and I had the flu in a big way. On my flight to Minneapolis, I felt this itch in the back of my throat. Waiting for my flight to Des Moines, a headache kicked in. On the plane, I started to sneeze. In the cab to the hotel, I started to cough. By the time I got to my room, I had the flu. I got undressed, crawled under the covers and stayed in bed for the next two days. By all rights, I should be back in my hotel room laying in bed, where I spent the last 48 hours. I don’t want the Bauer people to realize how sick I am, so I’m relieved that they’ve stuck me in an out-of-the-way cubicle, where unobserved I can allow myself to look as miserable as I feel.
On day three, still sick as a dog, I decided I had to get out of bed and do my job. I had planned on following one of the loopy conservative Christian candidates around — Bauer or Keyes — and writing something insightful and humanizing about the candidate, his campaign and his supporters. Then, from my deathbed, I caught Gary Bauer on MSNBC. “Our society will be destroyed if we say it’s OK for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman,” Bauer said. Seeing Bauer go off about gay marriage reminded me of something he said back in December when the Vermont Supreme Court came out for same-sex marriage. “I think what the Vermont Supreme Court did last week was in some ways worse than terrorism,” Bauer told the Associated Press.
In my Sudafed-induced delirium I decided that if it’s terrorism Bauer wants, then it’s terrorism Bauer is going get — and I’m just the man to terrorize him. Naked, feverish and higher than a kite on codeine aspirin, I called the Bauer campaign and volunteered. My plan? Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary. I would go to Bauer’s campaign office and cough on everything — phones and pens, staplers and staffers. I even hatched a plan to infect the candidate himself. I would keep the pen in my mouth until Bauer dropped by his offices to rally the troops. And when he did, I would approach him and ask for his autograph, handing him the pen from my flu-virus incubating mouth.
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Crushed that I won’t be going to the pizza party, I sit at the phone and make calls. An hour and half later, everyone else has left for the pizza party — except for Bauer’s press secretary, who is sitting in her cubicle rustling up media for Bauer’s W.W. II press conference. All alone, just me and the phones, the phones and me. I was going to miss the party, and that depressed me, but my sinuses were running like an open tap, so I probably didn’t need the pizza. And, anyway, I have work to do.
I went from doorknob to doorknob. They were filthy, no doubt, but there wasn’t time to find a rag to spit on. My immune system wasn’t all it should be — I was in the grip of the worst flu I had ever had — but I was on a mission. If for some reason I didn’t manage to get a pen from my mouth to Gary’s hands, I wanted to seed his office with germs, get as many of his people sick as I could, and hopefully one of them would infect the candidate.
So, much as it pains me to confirm a hateful stereotype of gay men — we will put anything in our mouths — I started licking doorknobs. The front door, office doors, even a bathroom door. When that was done, I started in on the staplers, phones and computer keyboards. Then I stood in the kitchen and licked the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack.
Savage was arrested following the publication of this article, and was tried and found not-guilty.
He did later plead guilty of ballot fraud by using his hotel address to claim Iowa residency and vote in the caucuses, which occurred while he was researching the above article. (Link)
At one point, he was quoted as saying that he had, “Put many things in my mouth, but Gary Bauer’s knob is not one of them.”
Savage does have a touch of the Gonzo Journalist in him, so it is possible that he was using Jon Swift type hyperbole to make a point.
But to those of you living in, or going to campaign in, Iowa or New Hampshire, would you be willing to walk into a Trump office with a fever of 101, smile at everyone, look helpful, and lick door knobs?
Well, are you?