Bush is still a shrub. (don't get me started).

It is not pretty when straight white guys experience the powerlessness of terror for the first time. They panic. They lash out. They speak rashly. They start wearing the extra-absorbent Infinite Freedoms. They hide the gals. They get all manly-man. Nobody can tell them anything. They don't want to hear it. With the threat/promise of a ground war, the Bush Putsch gave itself the power to suspend Clinton's failed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in the military. Not to worry; they've already imposed it everywhere else. White House "press secretary" Ari Fleischer blows off reporters with variations of "Don't Ask! Like I'd Tell!"

Tom Ridge now holds a new cabinet office that sounds like those hexagonal blue signs people poke in their lawns--THIS HOUSE IS PROTECTED BY HOMELAND SECURITY--and we all know they're not hooked up to anything. In his very brief briefings, Ridge is bug-eyed: "Don't Know, Can't Tell."

Attorney General John Ashcroft, who lost a Senate seat to a dead man, got his 341-page USA Patriot antiterrorism bill passed with little fuss. The sound you hear is shredders chewing up the Fourth Amendment: "Don't Care, Go to Hell."

And everywhere, any dissent is drowned out with hooligan chants of "USA! USA! USA!"--the new, politically correct way to say, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

To paraphrase some queen, it has been an annus horribilis. Since the red-blue polarizing presidential selection crisis of last November, I had already found, both personally and professionally, that it was easier to come out as lesbian than as a justice-loving progressive. I first noticed this unsettling shift last December when I did a show in Palm Beach, Fla.--ground zero during the election crisis. The theater audience, a loyal subscription series crowd intermixed with my gay following, was breath-held-in nervous during my political material. I could hear all of them exhale, "Phew!" when I talked about being a lesbian. Now there's a Florida switcheroo Fox's O'Reilly couldn't have predicted.

During my summer shows in Provincetown, I refined my public service job as Designated Bush Watcher. Someone had to do it. I expressed hope that this was the last blast of the straight white guys, though I worried aloud that they might take us down with them. Often I'd see people get up and leave during the Bush Bash section of the show. I pretended they had small bladders or needed to go out for a smoke.

Now, of course, it's going to be dicier.

My shows in the weeks following September 11 were mercifully canceled. (I couldn't have gotten to them anyway. Including the one down on Broadway and 50th.) One of my first outings was National Coming Out Day, October 11, when I performed at a benefit in Boston for SpeakOut, the gay and lesbian speakers bureau.

Lately, they told me, the Boston streets have teemed with paid signature shaggers for a coalition hoping to outlaw gay marriage in Massachusetts forever. SpeakOut has been fighting back by sending out volunteers to distract these collectors so they don't get signatures. One SpeakOut volunteer told me about a collector she'd talked to. He'd been kicked out of his house in Arizona; he was homeless, bisexual, and tired of selling his body. For him, this was a job. She told him why he shouldn't do it.

On that month's anniversary of September 11, I was shell-shocked, as we all were, speedballing between a freaky, fatalistic serenity and blind murderous panic about nuclear war. When I wasn't feeling, well, silly talking about things gay. But the courageous "Ask, Tell" of SpeakOut's gay ground troops completely reinspired me. I'm fighting self-censorship and trying to see this as an opportunity for change.

Audiences are traumatized. They're happy to be out, i.e., of the house. They laugh hysterically, glad for any release. It's easy to go easy. I could just do jokes--"Celine Dion goes into a bar; bartender says, `Why the long face?'" The current comedy coda is to lay off Bush, to stand behind the president. Huh. Only if I can put up two fingers behind his head.