Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage Read Free Book Online Page A

more problematically, I may or may not have broken the law when I participated in Iowa’s presidential caucuses. People don’t actually vote in Iowa’s caucuses, they “express a preference” in an informal balloting. When I found out that you didn’t need a state ID or proof of residency to “express a preference” in Iowa’s caucuses, I thought that was pretty fucked up. What was to stop out-of-state campaign staffers and activists who flood the state during the caucuses from showing up at caucus sites and expressing their preferences? A wealthy candidate like, say, Steve Forbes could flood caucus sites with paid supporters. (Forbes, in fact, placed a rather mysterious second in the 2000 Iowa caucuses.)
    I pointed all of this out in my story, imagining myself to be something like a reporter who goes downtown, buys drugs, and then writes about how easy it is to buy drugs downtown. No one arrests those reporters, do they? There was much yowling from conservatives about the doorknob licking, and the Drudge Report, the New York Post, and Free Republic came after me in a big way. A few weeks after the piece appeared on Salon.com , I was charged with felony vote fraud, and Iowa tried to put me away for six years. I signed a confidentiality agreement with the state of Iowa and Gary Bauer that prevents me from commenting any further. But please see these footnotes, which will hopefully explain everything on my behalf. 1 , 2
    The particular ATM with the antigambling message sat in the lobby of a three-story brick building that housed a restaurant, buffet, and the Iowa Welcome Center. The building also served as the entrance to the Diamond Jo, a riverboat casino moored in the muddy stretch of the Mississippi River that flows past Dubuque, Iowa. There was also a small rack on top of the ATM filled with information about gambling addiction. It was kind of like going to a crack house and finding a picture of Nancy Reagan and her JUST SAY NO slogan hanging on the door.
    Dubuque had the first riverboat casino in the United States, but the Dubuque Diamond Jo Casino —this particular boat—was actually the second riverboat casino moored at Dubuque. The first, “the majestic Casino Belle,” according to Dubuque’s daily paper, the Telegraph Herald, was replaced by the “spartan Diamond Jo,” after the owners of the Casino Belle moved their boat to Alabama. I didn’t find that out until after my first visit to the Diamond Jo, but even so, I knew something wasn’t right about the Diamond Jo the first time I laid eyes on it. The three-story brick building that serves as the casino’s entrance literally towers over the Diamond Jo . The scale is all wrong. Sitting next to the building built to complement the larger and more “majestic” Casino Belle, the Diamond Jo looks like a Honda Civic parked in front of Tony Soprano’s four-car garage.
    Staying in downtown Dubuque can be a very lonely experience. The streets were empty, and the downtown retail core felt abandoned. When I checked into the Dubuque’s “historic” Julien Inn in late October 2001, I was the only person in the lobby besides the clerk. Once a fine, old Victorian hotel, the Julien had been remod- eled in 1965 to look like the lair of some minor-league villain, the kind of evil subgenius Sean Connery disposed of in the first reel, and it doesn’t seem to attract many paying guests these days. In fact, the clerk seemed genuinely startled when I walked in and asked for a room. She quickly transitioned to vaguely suspicious when I made it clear that I was serious, and after I asked for one of the hotel’s one-bedroom apartments (a steal at $225 a week), she idled on hostile for the rest of our time together. I rode the elevator up to my room on the eighth floor of the hotel all by myself; I ate dinner in the hotel’s German-themed restaurant, the Alte Glocke, all by myself; I