Underground Diaries, Part 2
I’d succeeded in pleasing my superiors at Yahoo! News with my first “story” vid — The Ballad of Winnie Bago’s Thrashed Undercarriage — for the project we were calling American Subculture (AmSub).
Which was cool. I now had two more videos on the gay rodeo to make fast. We were talking about publishing AmSub every two weeks, with me doing three video clips, as many written pieces and a slideshow for each two-week feature. Or something like that. The way I got around in Final Cut Pro, that was going to be a challenge, to say the least.
Though, as previously pointed out, Neeraj wanted me to concentrate on story in these clips, I felt like a video that captured the overall feel of the subculture (or event) was important to our coverage. So that’s what I was trying to do with the second gay rodeo clip I made.
Now, by that point in time (August 2006), I’d gotten wind of a thing called Internet porn. I’d heard there were categories with coy names like bi-curious and gay-curious. Given these were names of internet porn categories, I considered it safe to assume that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD would get the joke of a clip named Gay Rodeo Curious. Plus, it seemed like an appropriate name for a “This is Gay Rodeo”-type clip.
I started cutting video, figuring I’d use a country western track from the music library Yahoo News used as background. But I couldn’t find anything that killed me and didn’t have a lot of patience for looking. Plus, I was already writing Gay Rodeo Curious in my head…
After roughing out the song on my old Guild acoustic (as I had Winnie Bago), I handed it off to Dirk, who did a swinging, sax-riffing arrangement. He then produced my vocal session, suggesting I go with an Elvis vocal. I sounded more like Chris Isaacs. It made us both laugh. The Yahoos, too…
GAY RODEO CURIOUS
Miskell/Ward
I guess you could say I was gay rodeo curious.
So I went to the LA Gay Rodeo.
And what I saw there was…
Real McCoys and chat room cowboys
Ropin’ and ridin’ all day
Bulls so mean, here and there a drag queen
Beefcake every which way
Cowgirls wrestlin’ steers
To cheers from the peanut gallery
You don’t like the way she walk the walk
What’s it to me if you cast aspersions that are spurious?
Because I’m gay, gay, gay, gay, gay…
Gay rodeo curious
Dressin’ up goats in petticoats
Scratch that – tighty whiteys
Stories told of wounds so old
Or fresh from recent rides
Dancin’ fools and simple tools
Fillies, studs and stallions
Ex-marines and tight blue jeans
Big old queer battalions
If all of my straight talk makes you furious
Maybe you’re gay, gay, gay, gay, gay…
Gay rodeo curious
Underground Diaries
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