Donnie, I still think you can change

I finally got around to watching the doc Jesus Camp this weekend, the disturbing, albeit flawed chronicle of three kids under the age of 12 who are already evangelists. Released just before the Bush empire's implosion was fueled by the fall of Mark Foley and Ted Haggard. Haggard, of course, is featured late in the film. And spooky as all the kids, parents and other ministers can be, I believed them as human beings. Haggard was simultaneously paranoid and arrogant, a professional ass and control freak that can't deal with a camera crew that he is not giving the marching orders to.

While Haggard is now in some bunker in Colorado Springs (perhaps next all those missles for him to probe in his free hours) being deprogrammed, his former call boy is working on a tell all book to be released this June.

As is often the case with DVDs of even the mildest intrest, it usually leads me along some web path, and in this case it bought me to this week's tempest in the blogosphere of the YouTube/MySpace "hoax" of the Donnie Davies who beams with pride of having been delivered from fagdom. He even has his own music video. Both MySpace and YouTube yanked the offending video, and he fought back with a few mildly amusing rants, all in character.

Donnie, it turns out, is a Texas-based actor named Joey Oglesby exposed by Joe.My.God, among others.

It all reminds me of our dear old friend Betty Bowers and the gang at Landover Baptist Church with their effective ex-Negro ministy and Rex Ray, doing his part to reach out and deliver the homos from sodomy. They have been at it for over a decade now.

Though technically all in good fun, these parodies, I feel a little sad after watching them. Maybe it's because that growing up in the heartland, I encountered too many "Donnie Davieses," self-loathing and overly eager to please and always feeling out of place wherever they end up. I can relate to that to a degree in that I've felt out of place everyplace I've lived even thought I was never in the closet.