My brother Craig would have found the great bathroom panic of '15 hilarious. We grew up in southeast Texas, Craig was queer, and trust me when I say that bathrooms were the least of his problems. Craig lived in a trailer set in a cow pasture, in east Harris County, 45 minutes outside of downtown Houston, and at night sometimes you'd hear the muscular flank of a black angus bull scratching against the molding on the corner of his house, which he owned clean, a glorious symbol of his long days spent driving a tractor for the City of Baytown, Texas, Parks and Recreation Department. Craig was a homeowner and the whole family was very proud of him for finally settling down. He had roamed for a good while, hitchhiked all over—got as far as Tiffin, Ohio!—gotten arrested for dope a couple of times, lived a life that seemed dangerous and skanky, but sort of exotic, too. Nobody was prouder of Craig than me, and I spend more than a little while trying to figure out how many groceries I'd need to sack in order to set myself up in such a nice home and get out from under my father's roof. We did not get along. So I had keys to Craig's trailer.

The summer after I graduated high school, Craig figured out he was gay, or he at last was able to admit to me that he was gay, and so one night I drove over to my brother's trailer and crammed my car full of his shit to help with his escape to a safe neighborhood in Houston called the Montrose. Being gay was not something to mess with in Baytown back in the day; bad things could happen to you. Bad things would happen to you, and so, kind of like Ahmadinejad's Iran, there were simply no gay people in Baytown. Just lots of confirmed bachelors. The biggest room in our town was the closet. Thirty miles away in the Montrose, you could feel safer.

Safer, that is, until now, because now, in Houston, it seems, you can't even go to the bathroom anymore. According to the stewards of our moral well-being, this is how sick it's gotten: today, on the election ballot, they've got an ordinance to legalize bathroom deviance. Why, bathrooms used to be the one place where we were truly safe. Is nothing sacred anymore? Of course, Houston's Proposition 1, known as HERO (Houston's Equal Rights Ordinance), doesn't actually mention the word bathroom. The ordinance is actually meant to ensure that you can't discriminate against a person based on religion, race, disability, sexual identification or gender identity (our all-time favorite discriminations, you might say). But when you talk these days about the rights of people against whom it has traditionally been just fine to discriminate, it seems that the mind just automatically goes to the toilet.

Here's Greg Abbott, the governor of the Texas, yesterday, tweeting about bathrooms.

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HOUSTON: Vote Texas values, not @HillaryClinton values. Vote NO on City of Houston Proposition 1. No men in women's bathrooms. — Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) November 2, 2015

Lance Berkman, who used to play for the Astros, made an ad in which he got to the heart of what HERO advocates are really after: "My wife and I have four daughters. Proposition 1 would allow troubled men who claim to be women to enter women's bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms. It's better to prevent this danger by closing women's restrooms to men, rather than waiting for a crime to happen. Join me to stop the violation of privacy and discrimination against women."

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The summer night that I moved Craig to Houston was in the early '80s, and by the time he arrived in the Montrose there was already a woman there named Annise Parker who worked in oil and gas by day and was a lesbian activist by night, and she was stirring things up and demanding things, like rights for all the queer rednecks like my brother who sought refuge in the Montrose. Like the right not to be beaten up or arrested for no good reason. Cops would do that all the time, and kids from my end of the county would go into Houston on the weekends to roll queers for sport. Parker studied the problem and became a scholar of "police misbehavior," and got enough reasonable people together who believed that the public safety wasn't served by harassing law-abiding queers, that it was in fact not only discriminatory (an argument not likely to get much traction in the 1980s in Houston) but a waste of taxpayer money (bingo). So this Annise Parker was no bomb thrower. She was a total operator. And she was setting about to change the world by changing Houston, Texas, of all places.

And because the arc of the moral universe bends toward southeast Texas (I think that's what King said), that same Annise Parker would go on to become mayor of Houston, and it is her equal rights ordinance that is on the ballot today, the same ordinance that is actually a government conspiracy to empower bathroom deviants, because bathroom deviants are everywhere, and everybody knows that this is the secret agenda of these people and their so-called "rights," because they might say that they just want freedom not to get fired or beaten up, which sounds deceptively reasonable, which is just like them, when what they really want is the right to engage in behavior so despicable that only the morally upright have taken great pains and considerable time to imagine it in every lurid, sweaty, vivid detail. This outrage must not stand.

Of course, no one thinks more about deviant sex than the moralist. It is a fetid imagination that regards an equal rights law (a law that most other large cities in the country already have) and immediately thinks: Our bathrooms are not safe. If these poor people—Abbott, Berkman, et al—did not have profile and power, the temptation would be to simply laugh at them. But because they do have power, the imperative is to ridicule them mercilessly.

I would like to think that today, as voters go to the polls in Houston, the city where my brother sought refuge for being different all those years ago, that he is having a good laugh from the graveyard out in east Harris County, under the loblolly pine, with the black angus grazing nearby.

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