A Gay WHAT?

A Gay BOMB. That's right. I just happened to be up last night reading about this year's winners of the Ig Nobel Prize and came across a particularly disturbing winner. The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio was awarded the 2007 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for suggesting research and development for a "gay bomb," which would cause same sex enemy troops to get freaky with one another. What? Now, the fact that they won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize this year is perfectly fitting. Ig Nobel is a play on the word ignoble, meaning not noble, not honorable and just plain stupid. So the award is not the disturbing issue. What is killing me softly is knowing that the United States Air Force proposed a $7.5 million dollar research project to develop the so-called "gay-bomb." This originally happened in 1994, the same year Clinton tried to openly admit gays into the military and then embarassingly settled on "don't ask, don't tell." Knowledge of the Gay Bomb proposal didn't reach mainstream media until 2005 but has regenerated attention with the 2007 prize. It is encouraging to know our military is going to absurd lengths to develop non-lethal weapons. The obvious problem is that the gay bomb proposal exposes profound institutional ignorance and hatred of homosexuality.


I ran out into the living room to share my discovery of the Gay Bomb only to find my roommates watching Tom Tykwer's (Run, Lola, Run director) movie Perfume (which i highly recommend, btw.) In the final scene of this disturbing murder flick, the protagonist splashes himself with perfume made from the bodies of several dead women. The crowd that had amassed to see his execution (for the murder of the several dead women) consequently falls into a rapture of love and lust for him and then for each other. A massive orgy ensues in which opposite and same-sex French peasants suddenly find each other irresistible. This movie was based on the book Perfume by Patrick Suskind, published in 1985. So, I'm wondering could the Gay Bomb proposal of 1994 have been influenced by this book? People in the military read books? Could it be? Incredible. You heard it here first.