DEAR READERS: I’m off this week. To tide all of your hot and/or kinky and/or sore asses over, here’s a column I wrote 15 years ago. Some newer readers might’ve missed this column when it originally appeared—some of you who were still in grade school, diapers, or amniotic sacs back in 1998—so I’m rerunning it now because I still get questions about “gerbiling” on a daily basis.

This statement is not controversial for the reasons one would hope: it isn’t controversial in the “Hey! That’s uncalled for!” sense, like, say, a woman at a dinner party announcing that she doesn’t have a hedgehog in her vagina. That would be uncalled for, because no one would suspect her of concealing a hedgehog. But being a gay man or Richard Gere in America means always having to reassure people that you don’t have a gerbil in your ass—at dinner parties, during family reunions, at funerals, on CNN, at passport control, wherever! For while gay men and, I assume, Richard Gere don’t put gerbils in their asses, not a day goes by that someone—usually a straight 13-year-old boy—doesn’t try to shove one in, figuratively speaking.

  1. The type of straight person who believes that gay men engage in “gerbiling” is likely to believe other gay stereotypes: we’re all prissy little swishes, for instance, with clean apartments and extensive collections of original Broadway cast recordings. Yet the same person who believes gay men are prim sissies also believes we’re capable of holding a struggling rodent in one hand while ripping its lower jaw off with the other, and then tearing its legs off (think of the mess!) and stuffing it up our butts—hardly a prim pastime. This is known as cognitive dissonance: the holding of mutually exclusive beliefs.

But guess what? In San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, gay ground zero, the pet store Petpourri, “where professionals answer your every question,” sells only pet supplies—no gerbils—and it doesn’t stock paper towel tubes or pliers, either. Animal Farm in West Hollywood, also a very gay place, sells only dogs and cats (which wouldn’t fit up anyone’s butt, not even Richard Gere’s). And guess what I learned while looking into this? Not only do pet stores in California not sell gerbils, but it’s actually illegal for them to do so.