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By Root 823 0

former construction worker who lives in a leafy but rundown neighborhood on the far east side of St. Paul, Minnesota. “Is it okay if I smoke?” he asked when I went to visit him, almost as soon as I had set foot inside his apartment. “’Cause I don’t ever not smoke.” It was daytime but one might not have known it. Although his picture window looked out on a small park in the rear of his apartment complex, the vertical blinds were shut tight and seemed to have been kept that way for some time. Gary himself, though, was a radiant individual, with unkempt blond hair, a handlebar mustache, and a constant, almost manic, grin. His photophobic habits, he explained, were simply a byproduct of his creative schedule. “I’ll go, like, forty-eight hours, even longer,” he said, when in the throes of a project.

One such project was “Joe & Dub’s Fabulous Wedding.” The ironies surrounding its success were many. First, for an animator in Flash (which Gary called “the white trash of movies”), Gary was astonishingly unsavvy with computers. He had made the entire project using only six commands that a friend had taught him; lacking a broadband Internet connection, he couldn’t even watch his own video online, nor could he view most of his competition. Second, although the entry had been accused (credibly) of homophobia, Gary was perhaps the campiest gay man I had ever met. Over his computer speakers, he played me tracks from his 1987 self-produced EP, StereoTopically Gay Music, which included a ribald song about the Supreme Court’s 1986 anti-sodomy decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. “Suddenly they’re on my back,” he sings of the Justices, “Upholding rigid penal codes / Emptying their thick workloads / I feel deeply violated and degraded as they draw / Their far-reaching and gripping / Uncut, pulsating, and dripping / Penetrating, probing, grueling / Filthy, smelly ruling / From the tight and twitching annals of the law.” (If only David Lat had started his legal blog twenty years earlier, Stewart would have been a viral sensation way back then.) Even the names of Stewart’s bands were pregnant with innuendo: “Gary Lee Stewart and the ScuttleButts”; “the Saggy Bottom Girls Jug Band.”

Gary lived on disability and social security. Back in 1973 he was, he claimed plausibly, the “first out gay man in Duluth”; he had been working in a government j ob, but lost it, he said, during one of the Nixon-era purges of gays from the civil service. After that he worked construction—“mostly remodeling, but I’ve done the real thing. I helped pour those silos up in Duluth, those big green towers.” As one might imagine, he kept his sexual orientation to himself.

“But somebody always seemed to know, you know?” he added. “I remember a crane operator who was staring at me, and I realized that I had seen him at a gay bar in Des Moines. And he didn’t like that there was somebody that had seen him. I was down in a hole, and I remember I had a feeling that he was going to kill me—and could, very easily. It would be just another industrial accident! I got out of that hole, and I never went back after that day. I never saw a glare like that before.”

I asked Gary to show me what he was working on now. His computer desk had two different ashtrays within arm’s length, and though he said he had wiped all the ash off the desk itself in preparation for my visit, I saw quite a bit of it still lurking about. He browsed around in his PC. “Okay, let’s see—I’m working on one called ‘Chickenhawk Bird Flu,’ ” he said, and pulled up an image. It was a composite of a small yellow bird wearing an army helmet, and onto the bird’s head had been superimposed the face of Dick Cheney. Gary pulled up another image, this one animated in a minimalist style. In it, the veteran Washington correspondent (and Bush critic) Helen Thomas was fronting a ragtag band, and the musicians behind her were other media notables: TV hosts Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart, plus the formerly kidnapped Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll.

In a third image, another animation, a woman strained to pull an elaborate