I have always failed to understand why a workplace as cramped and
unproductive as The Stranger‘s would require its own interoffice
mail-delivery boy. For the last few years, my working theory has been
that this delivery boy’s continued employment, despite the scandal
sheet’s obvious economic troubles, relates directly to the obscene
outfit that he wears year-round, despite the inappropriateness of his
too-small, obviously stolen United States Postal Service shorts for
winter conditions (and, truly, for any conditions that require a bit of
modesty and self-respect). I’m sure his lengthy tenure is also
connected to his daily trips to DAN SAVAGE’s office that frequently end
with his shirt askew (and I would imagine it takes quite a bit of doing
to cause a shirt that tight to become askew), his face flushed, and his
mind even more scattered than usual.

It was after one of these “deliveries,” sometime in the waning days
of August, I believe, that this mail boy traipsed into my office,
dropped a black envelope on my desk, pirouetted, and sashayed back into
Mr. Savage’s line of sight. I wondered if it was a mistaken delivery,
but it was an opportunity I could not pass up: Inside the envelope was
a request that I serve on the jury for HUMP! 5, this year’s attempt at
violating obscenity laws in the name of “love and sex and laughs.”

Trust, dear reader, that I was neither laughing nor loving nor
sexing in the slightest last week when I walked to the third-floor
“screening room”—which one enters through a door hidden behind
the enormous cotton-
candy spinner in Mr. Keck’s
office—presented my invitation, sat down, unstuck my right shoe
from the floor so that I might cross my legs, and then proceeded to
retch my way through submissions such as Citizen Came, Boys
Beware, I’m Hard, Dumpster Humpster, and How to
Please Your Man. By the time we got to Beyond Gay, I was
nearly beyond the reach of smelling salts (helpfully offered by Lindy
West, whose act of kindness does not erase last week’s Hooters tragedy)
and had to excuse myself. But not before I judged those submissions,
and by proxy all other HUMP! 5
submissions, to be damnable and,
one hopes, fully prosecutable.

All the while, of course, Mr. Savage was snickering, panting, and
toying with the rewind and slow-motion buttons. He said he was sad I
was leaving because he had so wanted to be sure that I saw a “hot”
sequence in Full Swap. I said I was not sad in the slightest and
I wanted to be sure that his mail-toy would never again skip into my
office and deliver a request for my presence at one of these illegal
gatherings. I believe we understood each other—though it was hard
to communicate over the moans of the other “judges”—and I hope
that by relating the disturbing details of this encounter, I have
prevented at least a few of this paper’s brain-damaged readers from
buying tickets to this year’s public screenings. Perverts: Save your
$20. You’ll need it for bail someday.