Gays have the right to be miserable too

Lubbock, Texas

The candidate is clad in a black Stetson, dark pearl-buttoned shirt and blue jeans, like a shambolic outlaw in some spaghetti western. But if he is inhibited by the audience of corpulent, stony-faced sheriffs glaring out from beneath their ten-gallon hats, he does not show it. Within the first two minutes of his stump speech, the ageing cowboy with Frank Zappa facial hair and a history of substance abuse proudly confesses to lewd conduct and breaking a state law.

‘I’m a member of the Mile High Club,’ declares Kinky Friedman, the former country and western singer, to delegates at the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas conference, where stalls advertise professional ‘tragedy clean-up’ services and a commemorative handgun auction. ‘I’m a solo member.’

Allegations by political opponents that he had sipped from an open liquor can while driving at the head of a recent St Patrick’s Day parade in Dallas are true, he continues, clutching an unlit Montecristo No. 2 Cuban cigar. ‘It was Guinnessgate 2006. I admit I did drink the Guinness —but I did not swallow.’

Friedman, whose nickname derives not from any sexual antics, airborne or otherwise, but from his now-thinning ‘Jewish Afro’ hair, used to be best known first as the singer with the Texas Jewboys. Then he became a writer of off-beat detective novels (starring himself) with titles like Armadillos and Old Lace and Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned.

The Jewboys’ cult hits managed to upset just about every group imaginable. ‘They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More’ contained every ethnic slur imaginable. ‘Proud to be an Asshole from El Paso’ (a skit on Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee’) cast aspersions on some Texans’ affinity with sheep. ‘Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed’ prompted campus protests from feminists.

Friedman is still doing his best to offend people but he is achieving new notoriety as an insurgent candidate for governor of Texas, the post held by George W.