All this crap on the tele and the funny papers about ex-Florida Congressman Mark Foley has got Clockwork mighty jealous. See, mostly years ago, not so much lately, we often found ourselves completely blotto on the booze. There were times when we said stupid things, did stupid things and spewed stupid things. There was the time we blacked out after a wedding and awoke on a couch in a puddle of re-rendered Kamikaze shots, not remembering climbing in the car, driving home and arriving at our final, vomitous destination.
Now, in all those incidents–except perhaps the blackout; who knows what we did on the drive home–at no time did we feel the need to turn on a computer, open IM and start engaging in pedophilic talk with a boy. How one could type such a long, involved, thought-out exchange, with near perfect punctuation, while, as Foley and his mouthpiece are now saying, he was secretly drunk . . . well, that's just amazing. Hats off to you, ex-Mr. Congressman! The thought of even READING an IM while totally toasted would be enough to make us short out the keyboard and monitor with our up-chucked gimlets. Mark Foley, you are our new superstar.
But there's another part of what Foley and his high-priced shark are saying that's got us confused. His lawyer also admitted that Foley is gay–and the journos on the tele and in the funny papers immediately reported that this was some huge surprise. But our own new sister paper, the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, reported way back in May 2003 that Foley's queer. And that reporting was apparently chastised in South Florida as so much rubbish and how dare the New Times put forth such a story. (Reminds me of another certain alternative weekly and the reception it gets when it breaks a story and everyone calls it rubbish–until the mainstream dailies re-write the same story months later. Such is life.). There are people in the New Times story–SUPPORTERS OF FOLEY–who said it was common knowledge Foley is gay, something Foley, a champion of same-sex marriage–had every opportunity to confirm but never did . . . because he was obviously three fabulous Martha Stewart silk sheets to the wind at the time.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.