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Why was GayJews.net Missing from Friday, January 24 to May?
As a gay man, stereotype dictates that I have a special penchant for drama. As a Jewish man, stereotype dictates a penchant for victimization. I hate stereotype and work hard to kick stereotype’s ass whenever possible. That said, this was a doozy in the intersection between Drama and Victimization. And I will hereby use my little story of woe as explanation for the site being gone.
On Friday, January 24th, as I was sitting in my office here in LA doing whatever it is that I do, I got a call to go down to the lobby. There, I met two guys dressed in Hawaiian shirts who showed me their badges and informed me that they were with the Secret Service. You know, the Secret Fricken’ Service, the people who run alongside our president’s limo reminding him how to spell, etc.
So the Secret Service told me nothing but that they had a search warrant for my house and that they could have just busted the door down but that they were kind enough to wait for me to get home to let them in. I thought that this was particularly thoughtful, especially considering that my dog would probably have peed himself with fear had they entered unaccompanied. He’s real tough (my dog). So they followed me in their nondescript government vehicle as I drove home in the worst traffic of my life, desperately trying to think of what this could be all about.
First of all, I knew it couldn’t have to do with the president or anything. I mean I think that by and large he’s a terrible president and I certainly didn’t vote for him but I embrace the American public’s inalienable right to pull the wrong levers and punch the wrong chads and generally make the wrong decisions. I would fight for and even die for our glorious freedom the vote that... person... into office. Okay, so it wasn’t that.
From watching In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood, I had learned that the Secret Service handles counterfeiting too (I also learned that apparently, even if you’re 85 years old, Rene Russo will utterly fall in love with you if you put on the schlimazel routine with enough schmaltz). So I figured maybe they thought I’d been using my HP OfficeJet printer to churn out 50s and 100s. Again, this seemed pretty unlikely, though I certainly spend it as if I make it in the garage. I was at a complete loss.
So I got home to find eight other Secret Service guys waiting on my front lawn with the word “POLICE” printed across their bullet-proof vests. While “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you” played in my head, I let them into my house while my neighbors looked on hoping it was going to be something juicy like OJ or Robert Blake or Leona Helmsley.
They sat me down in my living room and started going through every inch of my house. I begged them to be careful in the bathroom as I had just redone the grout (I’m the kind of person who would have put a shower cap on as the Titanic went down).
As they went through my house disconnecting and confiscating every computer I have, they accused me of having been hacking into my old employer, MTV’s computer systems for the last 6 months. Apparently, I’d been in there reading the President, Monte Burns’ emails to friends about world domination through the production of mediocre TV shows or something like that.
In 1930s police movie parlance, I started singing like a canary. Unfortunately, all I could tell them is that I would never ever be involved with anything like that and that I had loved MTV and why would I ever want to harm them (though if they rerun the Video Music Awards one more time I think I’ll join the radical right-wing born-agains protesting out in front of the MTV building).
As an aside, my mother later asked me, in that fearful whisper that was usually heard in the shtetle square just before a major pogrom, “Do you think they knew you’re gay?”
“I’m not sure, ma,” I told her. “I wonder whether the Life of Ricky Martin oversized coffee table book or the still-in-the-box, mint-condition N*sync Action Figure Collection which sits next to my Chumash with Rashi Commentary in the living room where they interrogated me might have given it away. What do you think?”
Anyway in confiscating all of my computers, all of the backups of all of my computers, my PalmPilot, the memory card in my digital camera - and, I’m not sure, but I think they took Muttle’s New Sewing Machine – they were also confiscating GayJews.net. And I felt just terrible about that. I told the Special Agent that they would be taking down a community service web site that people really seem to care about. Apparently, this did not bother the Special Agent a whole hell of a lot. Mind you, this is the man who, in a particularly poignant bit of symbolism, knocked my large, floor-standing Menorah over not once but twice during the interrogation. How badly I wanted to ask when he intended to usher some pigs into the Temple. Fortunately the thought of spending Passover with Leona Helmsely and Michael Milliken in the Federal Pokey shut me up but good.
So GayJews.net has been gone for months now.
During that time, I had to hire a $450 per hour lawyer. He was a good lawyer, I’m sure. It’s just that I found it a bit disturbing that in every conversation, whether in person or on the phone, even if he was in the middle of a sentence, he stopped and said “KACHING!” every six minutes.
I also had to fly my mother in to LA from Tel Aviv where she lives because, let’s face it, you can be a 35 year old man with a job and a house and a dog and a Volvo but when the Secret Service serves you with a search warrant, you want your mommy. Once again, in keeping with the gay and Jewish stereotype, I’ll say that my mother is a saint. A saint who stayed in my house for three days before I made her move to a hotel a block away ‘cause she was driving me insane. Still, a saint!
Finally, two weeks and lots of Tylenol PM later, the Secret Service found out that some guy who used to work for me at MTV and whom I had fired, apparently had a massive vendetta against me and had spent the past year and a half hacking into my computer systems and using them to do naughty things, making it look like it was me. All of a sudden, I’m Sandra Bullock in The Net.
So I’m off the hook.
Boy, I really slipped through the grasping fingers of the law. Now, I get to tell guys about my history with the Feds. Yeah, I’m a bad-boy. I’m a tough, don’t-mess-wit-me kinda gay Jew. It really gets the boys hot.
Sadly, it’s now been months and the Secret Service is keeping much of my computer equipment as evidence against the putz who tried to get me thrown in jail and I really can’t afford to purchase new stuff to on which to run GayJews.net. But the Secret Service has returned some of my backup data of the web site and I’ve obviously figured out some way to get a hold of some equipment or you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
So if you’re reading this it means that I found some kind of way to bring GayJews.net back up and I’m so happy to be able to do it!
Finally, the moral of this story:
- Computer Security is nothing to take lightly. Especially if you have DSL or a cable modem, I highly recommend spending a very few bucks and installing virus protection software and even “personal firewall software” (example: http://www.symantec.com/sabu/nis/nis_pe/) to protect your computers.
- When you fire someone at work make sure that they’re not stark-raving MAD. If they are, do what everyone else in corporate America does and just promote them instead. Safer and far more effective.
- If you want Rene Russo, develop a drinking problem and appear as down-on-your-luck as possible.
- Gay Jews need to unite. A silly little multi-billion dollar, world-girdling corporation like Viacom/MTV – which is mostly made up of Gay Jews anyway – shouldn’t have believed that I would ever have had anything to do with this horrible crime. A proper Gay Jewish Media Conspiracy could have helped avoid all this.
- Upon advice from council, I have included this moral of the story which is... KACHING!
Shalom U’vrakha