A face in the crowd. Via Avedon Carol, I see that Susie Bright has a longish post on our friend "Jeff Gannon"/James Guckert, and the connection between his past and current professions:

Bulldog [Guckert's Web porn alias], if he is anything like other gay hookers, has been at this for years, and has grown into his present persona. He moved up into a position a younger man wouldn’t have, where he learned a lot of dirt about people because he was fucking them and getting high with them. He advertised that he likes “to party,” which in sex ad jargon means that he was up for doing speed/ecstasy/cocaine. He would do a little bump with you, or more. This infers he got to know his client’s drug preferences as well as their erotic ones.

A pro like Guckert is going to inevitably have men who want to feel close to him, who wish the fantasy would be “more real,” or at least more frequent. As any pro will tell you, if you want to get closer— if you want them to turn up the volume— an escalating stream of money and presents is how you make that happen. It is the only way. ...

I am convinced Bulldog got into the press corps because someone was deeply in love with him, i.e, with the fantasy he provides. Others in the game saw what he could be used for. Jeff's client wanted more of Jeff, he wanted preferential status, he wanted promises. Gannon, like any pro with a big fish on the line, was growing weary of diamonds and furs.

A mature hooker wants something that will lead to independence; like property, inheritance rights, or a new career. The ultimate way to win your hooker’s favors is by offering something that gives them the same kind of independence that you, the civilian, possess.

Now, Susie Bright knows sex work in a way I can't possibly—but she's wrong about JimJeff, wrong in a way I think a lot of people are, wrong in a way that says something quite interesting about this story.

Hookers don't take day jobs. Certainly not successful, well-connected hookers of the sort Susie imagines James Guckert to have been. Certainly not the sort of forty-hour-a-week, fifty-weeks-a-year, soul-sapping small office jobs that James Guckert worked for twenty years before he moved to D.C. to become "Jeff Gannon." Successful, well-connected hookers don't live for years in two-bedroom duplexes on nowhere-in-particular stretches of suburban road on the Pennsylvania-Delaware border.

The verdict may not be completely in, but if James Guckert ever traded sex for money, at best he did it part-time. He likely did it with no more success than he seems to have done anything else. And I'd say the odds are he wasn't really a prostitute at all—he just played one on the Web. Everything we know about him suggests a somewhat thwarted, small-time fantasist—play Marine, play hooker, play journalist.

A small-timer who got caught up in something bigger. That's James Guckert. A lot of the excitement behind his story is attested to in Susie Bright's post—the idea that JG is the loose thread that unravels, say, some cabal of closeted, self-hating gay White House insiders. It's a product of the natural perceptual tendency to assign outsize importance to an anomaly—and of the desire, given the extraordinary and virtually uniform media discipline of this administration, to seize on any lapse in the hope that this one's going to be the one that lets us open the curtain and finally, incontrovertibly demonstrate to the world the machinery behind it.

And this is a story about the machine, but not in the dramatic, All the President's Gay Men way people want it to be. It's a story about small-timers and their dodges. It doesn't take place, except peripherally, in the halls of power: it shows the machinery from another, but maybe more illuminating, angle, by showing us the rabble of hustlers and wannabes that circulate in its lower reaches, some of them with, some without money, but all of them looking for a leg up.

It's a story about people like Bob Johnson, a Domino's Pizza franchisee with more money than brains, who thought he'd get to be a player by funding a Web-based talk radio network for his buddies in the Free Republic organization. It's a story about GOPUSA's Bobby Eberle, who saw a good business model in a phony news service. It's a story about Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, a credentials mill for aspiring right-wing activists, where "Jeff Gannon" got certified (to Bobby's satisfaction) as a journalist. It's a story about a cadre of wingers who saw the Internet and new media as their own, still relatively untrodden path to the big money. It's a story about a hierarchy of Republican grifters, running from little fish in little local offices in the western Philadelphia suburbs all the way up to sharks like Grover Norquist and Alan Keyes in their Arlington suites.

James Guckert didn't get promoted into the machine because he was a gay hooker—or, for that matter, in spite of it. He got promoted because he had a plausible look, he knew to say the right code words in the right order, and because nobody knew what he'd been doing on the Web in his spare time or bothered to look. (With so many hustlers to pick from, who would have taken one up with a gay porn past if they'd been aware of it? Who would have risked spoiling their shot the way Bobby Eberle's has been spoiled?) Guckert got promoted because people get careless—careless from hunger, from opportunism, careless most of all because the ascendancy of the Right seems like a guarantee of impunity to anybody looking to separate the boobs from their bucks. And God knows there are lots of bucks, lots of them sloshing around through lots of interlinked organizations, and lots of opportunities (if you're not especially burdened with scruples) to grab your share out of the churn.

That's the story: a Right so awash with money, so certain of being untouchable by the law, so infested with grifters, that a "Jeff Gannon" becomes inevitable. James Guckert wasn't smart, he wasn't talented, he wasn't connected—at least, past whatever one small-time connection piped him into the machine. All he was was available and willing. Just a face in the crowd.

posted by michael  11:40:43 AM  
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