This column is being republished with permission from its original home on Substack. For more from Michael Ian Black, subscribe here.
Anxious liberals not wanting to offend our more sexually fluid friends, I offer my permission to make fun of Kristi Noem’s cross-dressing husband. It’s ok to mock Lindsey Graham for being (allegedly) closeted. It’s ok to make jokes about Grindr crashing out at CPAC—because of the demand, not because those God-fearing conservatives blocked it.
All of it’s a-ok in my book so long as we understand that what’s funny about Graham isn’t that he prefers men; it’s that he and his GOP cohort have, for decades, trafficked in the worst kind of satanic panic over sexuality while being utter hypocrites on the subject. If Matt Schlapp can play grab-ass with his young male staffers, then it’s our duty as Americans with our own red, white and blue libidos to taunt these dumb f–ks with all the rhetorical sticks and stones within arm’s reach. Or, if you prefer the low-hanging fruit analogy, take all the damned fruit you want. Just make sure you wait for it to rot before hurling it at these horn dogs.
As the writer Charlotte Clymer succinctly put it: “I don’t care what Kristi Noem and her husband are doing in their private lives. It’s none of my business what consenting adults do in private. But I do find it very strange that these people believe the private lives of the rest of us are their business while they’re doing this.”
Exactly so. But couldn’t Kristi Noem’s husband at least take the time to point his fake nipples in the same direction before donning his booby shirt? That’s just common sense.
Republican hypocrisy is nothing new, of course. Nor is Democratic hypocrisy. The fact is, politicians adhere to my own rule on the matter: I’m fine with hypocrisy, so long as the hypocrite in question is me. Everybody else? Off with their heads.
What’s particularly maddening about the Republican version of this, however, is the foundational lie upon which they’ve erected their Temple of Purity. These two-faced holy rollers are happy to condemn anything and anyone that doesn’t conform to their narrow—and narrow-minded—view of knockin’ boots, while at the same time twisting their own bedsheets into Kama Sutra figurines. All of it informed by a view of human sexuality that hasn’t been much updated since the Bronze Age.
I don’t understand. I don’t understand why our government has anything at all to say about which holes consenting adults stuff with various objects and genitals. I don’t understand why the government has anything to say about how people dress. Or who they love.
Is it funny that the cuckolded Bryon Noem gets his rocks off flirting with self-described “bimbo” sex workers? I mean, yeah. It’s pretty f–king funny. But it’s also tragic.
Because a central tenet of modern Republican politics is pathologizing human sexuality. Which leaves people ike Bryon in the same terrible position gay people have faced forever: either risk scorn and exile from their community or live a desperate lie. What emerges from this impossible choice is what we see: bizarre caricatures of traditional gender roles no different than the drag queens they’ve told us are a danger to all we hold dear. As I wrote in my book, A Better Man, “the only difference between RuPaul and Chuck Norris is glitter.”
My sensitive liberal brothers and sisters are understandably reluctant to make too much hay out of Republican sexual hypocrisy, lest they get skewered for their own double standards. I can already see the “Stop kink-shaming Bryon Noem" finger-wags. To which I say: no.
Shame away.
If you’re going to build your brand, your party, your entire political identity around who gets to kiss who, then you don’t get to retreat into “privacy” the moment your own proclivities wander into the daylight—or onto the front page of a tabloid newspaper—like Andy Dick on a bender.
And that’s the line, right? Not “don’t make jokes.” Not “protect their dignity.” They forfeited that when they made dignity conditional for everyone else. The line is: punch up, not down. Mock the hypocrisy, not the humanity. Laugh at the absurdity of men and women screaming about “family values” while vacationing on Epstein Island.
Because what’s actually grotesque isn’t the sex. It never was. (I mean, yes, Lindsey Graham having sex seems kind of gross.) It’s the cruelty. It’s the legislation. It’s the endless parade of policies designed to make other people smaller, quieter, more afraid.
So yes, make the jokes. Pick all the low-hanging fruit you can grab. Take the shots. But aim them where they belong: not at desire, but at deceit. Not at identity, but at the performance of righteousness by people who wouldn’t recognize it if it walked in wearing assless chaps asking for a campaign donation.
Don’t pop poor Bryon’s balloons—we’re having so much fun. For more commentary and righteous consternation from Michael Ian Black, click through to Substack.
