Conservative activist and now notorious U.S. Senate office phone-tamperer James O’Keefe and his mentor Ben Wetmore video-taped themselves in 2008 going to three state offices in Massachusetts, applying for marriage licenses and openly admitting that they were straight men who wanted simply to take advantage of the benefits. Designed to underline the fact that straight people posing as gay people can do what straight people acting as straight people have been doing for ages, the “investigative journalism” value of the stunt is debatable. In any case, the drama was developed more artfully for a mass audience in the popular series Boston Legal, when the two stars, James Spader and William Shattner, hitched for financial reasons in the final episode. ABC acknowledged the faux-quality of the arrangement by referring to the hitching as “straight marriage” instead of “gay marriage.” Video of the O’Keefe-Wetmore gonzo hitching after the jump.
O’Keefe as investigative journalist:
Mary McNamara at the LA. Times reviewed the “fitting end to the most devoted, and deranged, couple on television.” She was talking about Spader and Shattner not O’Keefe and Wetmore.
It was a fitting end to the most devoted, and deranged, couple on television. Since the show’s spin-off from “The Practice” five years ago, the friendship between Denny (William Shatner) and Alan (James Spader) has been both the anchor and the pixie dust of Davd E. Kelley’s award-winning show, with each episode ending with the two men out on the balcony, smoking cigars, drinking scotch and talking about the vagaries of the human condition. Through Denny and Alan, Kelley and his writers attempted to explore that elusive creature — male emotional intimacy — and in doing so launched a thousand knockoffs, now known in entertainment media parlance as “bromance.” But none of them hold a candle to the boys of “Boston Legal.”
Late additional edit note: The title on the video, “Non-gay men with girlfriends get married” goes pretty far to make the case that they’re not really gay guys, doesn’t it?
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