He's about
as fearless a voice as we have in America right now. If you
tell him that, as I did, over drinks at the Beverly Hills
Hotel--just down the street from where he
lives--he'll scoff and remind you that bravery
involves dismantling bombs. But gays have no better friend
in the media than Bill Maher, who treats the
still-verboten topic of total equality for gays and
lesbians--from gay marriage to gay sex to gay
anything--with nonchalant conviction as he
muses, pontificates, jostles, and hammers mainstream
America weekly from his television platform. Maher was
practically incinerated by the media and the public
immediately following 9/11 when he suggested that the
hijackers were brave in their own way--a
statement he meant not as a compliment but an acknowledgment
of fact--and lost his ABC platform, only to rise
like a phoenix on the more hospitable HBO with his
weekly Real Time With Bill Maher. In 2006, as gay sex
scandals helped to scuttle the Republican dream of a
perpetual majority, Maher's razor-sharp New
Rules monologues became our favorite way to keep
score. After the Mark Foley mess came to light, Maher listed
a dozen worse threats to American youths, including
military recruiters and corporate pitchmen.
"Stop with the righteous indignation about
predators," he concluded. "This whole country
is trying to get inside your kid's pants,
because that's where he keeps his wallet."
A fascinating
amalgam of bleeding-heart member of the intelligentsia and
man's man--he is a regular at the Playboy
mansion, has his share of hetero commitment issues,
and is a sports freak--Maher is at once one of the
most famous and most quoted men in America, and most
disconcertingly free of attitude. I told him, and
meant it, that he was the least narcissistic celebrity
I've ever interviewed. As we sat over drinks at night
in a pitch-dark romantic booth on the patio of the
Polo Lounge, the unabashed hetero and I, we both
appreciated the irony.
