gay bomber

Some of you may have stumbled across this story in the last couple of days, in which the Pentagon spent 7.9 million dollars to build a bomb that would make enemy forces “turn gay”, drop their weapons, and cease fighting in favor of rigorous copulation with their fellow soldiers. Predictably, said plan went down in, uh, flames.

(Via Too Sense)

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.

[...]

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviwing the documents.

I know that many of you may feel that this story is too ridiculous to be believed, but I know that it’s true. For you see, my father worked on that project, something that he has later said that he regrets, not only for its clear implausibility, but because of what it did to our family.

Sigh. This is a difficult story for me to tell. I hope my Dad doesn’t mind. I know that he signed documents stating that he would respect the classified nature of his work for twenty-five years after his retirement, but, well…part of this has to do with me, so I feel like I have the right to tell you the truth.

It was in 1970. My twin brother and I were toddlers and our family was living in on-base housing in Cocoa Beach, Florida at Patrick Air Force Base.

At 6:00pm, as usual, my father came through the door in his uniform, laid his briefcase on the hall table, and scooped up whichever baby was closest. On that fateful day, it was me.

Unbeknown to us all, there was a stray patch of Teh Gay still on his uniform jacket. My mother was the first to notice.

“Charles!” she cried, “Your jacket! The baby!”

“Jesus Christ!” my father said, “Oh, god, what have I done?”

They rushed me to the bathroom where they held me under the steaming spray from the shower-nozzle, frantically scrubbing away with washcloths and brushes. They got rid of all the visible residual Gayness, but still scrubbed until my skin was pink and I began to wail in protest.

My mother tenderly laid me out on the bed with my father hovering nearby, praying that the damage hadn’t already been done.

“He seems okay,” my mother said, drying my face and ears.

“Gucci!” I said, “Arugula! Pucci, Luiviton!”

“He’s just babbling gibberish,” my Dad said, “I guess we got it in time.”

But tears ran down my mother’s face. She knew.

And that’s the story of how the Gay Bomb has affected me. Most days, I just thank god that I wasn’t affected by any of the other top-secret projects that my father was working on at the time, like the Wedgie Bomb, the repeating Spitball Cannon, or Cootie Gas. I understand that the specialists working on these projects only wanted what was best for our country. I mean, if you could turn an entire enemy army gay and give them cooties, you’d be the mightiest army on earth. And while I guess there was just no way of knowing the heavy toll that The Gay Bomb would take in my life and in the life of my family, I do sometimes wonder how things might have been.