Gays Love the Nixon Library!

Anthony Pignataro:

If you read only one New Yorker Talk of the Town story this week, make sure it’s this one: Dana Goodyear’s wonderful look at how Judge Vaughn Walker’s overturning of Prop 8 will benefit the wedding industry. The whole story is delish, but the money quote comes from one Michael Willms, identified in the piece as a “gay Los Angeles wedding planner,” who is talking about performing weddings when the Prop 8 ban was still in place:

“We just did a fabulous wedding at the Nixon Library for a gay couple who have been together fifteen years,” Willms said. “They have a replica of the East Wing of the White House there.”

Hey, business is business (click here to plan your own wedding at the library and birthplace of America’s crookedest president). But we’re thinking California’s not-so-favorite son might not have too big a fan of holding such events at the site of his museum and grave. To wit, here’s the former president (and budding historian on all things homosexual) lecturing John Ehrlichman on May 13, 1971:

“I don’t want to see this country go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates… Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags… You know what happened to the popes? It’s all right that popes were laying the nuns… That’s been going on for years, centuries, but when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell in, I don’t know, three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual… Now, that’s what happened to Britain, it happened earlier to France. And let’s look at strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn it, they root them out, they don’t let ’em hang around at all. You know what I mean. I don’t know what they do with them.”

Believe me, this stuff never gets old.