We’re Taking Charge of Climate Change
In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire...Hurricanes Hardly Happen! - Eliza Doolittle
If only Professor Higgins and Eliza had taken that lesson one step further: because homos hasten them.
Yes, fellow queers, in the midst of Hurricane Sandy bearing down on Delmarva, another member of the God squad descended from his Mega church mountain to inform his congregation that it’s the queers who steer storms. Not global climate change. Not upper currents and low pressure. Not the Frankenstorm syndrome.
It’s us. God’s retribution. Duh. That left turn Sandy took into the continental U.S. is apparently a direct result of the homos in Hoboken (but wait...there probably aren’t that many homos in....) Never you mind, heathen.
This cheerful bit of news reached us as we were out here in Rehomo with our hetero neighbors preparing for high winds and talking trash (removal). It was enough to ruin our Sunday with Sandy. But just as we were about to apologize to our neighbors for sending Sandy our way, a question dangled in the fast accelerating breeze. How would Sandy skip their hetero house and destroy our homo one? Was there actually a queer eye for the straight storm?
I was dubious at first about injecting religion into a hurricane, but then it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe human behavior did indeed cause destruction. So, to be fair and balanced, let’s head to the “Show Me State” of Missouri and study some raging hetero human behavior.
Branson, Missouri, “the buckle of the Bible Belt” and the Christian Las Vegas, was lacerated by a series of Cat 5 tornadoes earlier this year. Winds 100 mph stronger than Sandy’s lashed a squeaky clean all-American town—a place where the only pole dancing is during Polish Heritage Week. Its website boasts Family! Family! Family! as the obvious roadblock to the homos—and so we depraved are deprived of a Christian Choir followed by an Elvis impersonator and a wholesome animal act. It’s the patriot’s paradise where Anita Bryant is deified and Lee Greenwood can be prouder than proud to be a straight American. They take God, guns, and their anti-gay attitude and spread that good word far and wide. What happens in Branson is absolutely encouraged to leave Branson.
It was leveled. Whoops.
So if gay lust is what creates wind gusts...what does that say of the poor residents of Branson? And would it matter to the right Reverend that we cared for and about fellow hetero humans who were affected by the tornado? And we can do so without unhinged reasonings about its cause. Maybe the legendary Missouri favorite son Mark Twain could shed light on this. A lifelong supporter of women’s rights and civil rights, he famously once posited: “If Christ were here right now, there is one thing he would not be. A Christian.”
Enter Ellen Degeneres. Recipient of the 2012 Mark Twain prize for humor, our lesbianic heroine once famously quipped at the Academy Awards that the best way to drive the terrorists crazy was for them to see a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews. Same with weather I ‘spose. Ellen and I share the hometown roots of New Orleans. In 1965, before I was a homosexual, I only knew that I was starting to “like” boys and loved my sister’s pom pom’s. These were secrets never to be spoken. I vividly remember my parents taking the family to see My Fair Lady at the Robert E. Lee Theater—in a place and time when women wore dresses and gentlemen wore sport coats to the movies. I remember gasping at Eliza’s ball gown when she appeared at the top of that staircase after her transformation. Along the way, Eliza had already learned where hurricanes went and why the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain (which is a fallacy, by the way). And there on the cusp of puberty, I was about to begin my own odyssey of transformation.
Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans that same year. 120 mph winds lashed our home, and at the height of storm, the Mundt family wondered in unison whether we should have evacuated to the local school gym. Just about every single home in our neighborhood had that flimsy aluminum patio cover engineered in the sixties. My mother said later, “Those aluminum slats danced in the back yard all night.” Our front door blew open late in the evening, and my dad rushed to push the sofa against it and had me sit on it. He quickly found a hammer and nailed it shut. We took turns sleeping on the sofa until the winds subsided. Our anxiety didn’t dissipate until the dawn, but then we awaited word of flooding from breached levees. We survived, but Hurricane Katrina took that home away 40 years later.
And that’s when it hits me that at this age, I’ve weathered plenty and I can take a nasty minister’s blustering and insane assertions. But an eleven year old kid can’t—so here’s some sage advice to a kid born eleven years ago: Ignore the ignoramus. Live who you are and where you please: Hertord, Hereford, Hampshire, or Hoboken. Or perhaps Rehomo? Somehow, despite our Gayberry demographic, Sandy spared us. Everyone is welcome here at CAMP Rehoboth.
And if your parents ever plan a vacation in Branson, run. Like the wind.
Brent Mundt resides in Washington, DC, but lives in Rehoboth Beach. .