Surgeries of tomorrow.

Since this is The Advocate's plastic surgery issue, I want to dedicate my column to Mother Teresa. As you may know, MT is on the fast track to sainthood. And the remains of an earlier Teresa, St. Teresa of the Little Flower, are on tour in the United States right now. I was asked to open for her. The Relic Tour is perhaps meant to link subliminally the words saint and Teresa in the minds of the faithful.

MT is, to me and many others, the Patron Saint of Wrinkles. The deep furrowing came to the Sainted Little Mother either from the worries of the world--and don't include overpopulation or homophobia on her list--or from wearing her headpiece a little too low and tight for years. To help speed up the sainting process, if any of you have miracle stories of wrinkle removal that do not involve minor surgery, clinical abrasives, or collagen injections, please send them along to me at www/rinkle.com.

As a devout gay trader with much of my portfolio in biotech issues, I know that plastic surgery, with its cutting and stitching, will soon be seen as a barbaric thing of the past. A little tweak here, a little laser there on the double helix ribbon of DNA, and there will be no more wrinkles, no more cellulite, no disease. Why, look what it's done for our tomatoes!

So in the absence of plastic surgery, I suggest the following new procedures:

* Bombastic Surgery. This involves the removal of Jesse Helms from the Senate and certainly from the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. His blocking the ambassadorships of Jim Hormel and Carol Moseley-Braun, his impeding the payment of our U.N. debt, and his thwarting the passage of the nuclear test ban treaty show that he is suffering from Reptile Dysfunction. In his Senate speech against the treaty, watched carefully by rogue nations with hunks of plutonium in their pockets and an itch to use them, the Jowled One actually spoke of Bill Clinton and "yer little friend Monica." He also tossed some "little ladies" out of his chambers as they tried to deliver an international letter denouncing violence against women. Bombasts away!

* Ecclesiastic Surgery. This involves the clearer separation of church and state. We all know how important boundaries are. Why do all the presidential candidates (whisper with me now: "I see dead people") feel compelled to share with us their experiences with their personal lord and savior? After the Columbine shootings, the House decreed that the way to keep guns out of schools is to hang up the Ten Commandments in each classroom. Based on that brilliant solution, I recommend that school uniforms be made of Kevlar. The Kansas board of education in August ruled that science classes could no longer use the d word--Darwin. Show me the monkey! (Kansas did, however, keep the Rev. Fred Phelps as state bird.)

* Elastic Surgery. This procedure involves not excising but restoring. There seems to be a chronic, if not fatal, hardening of the categories in our movement in these last days of the Gay '90s. There are food fights and shin kicking at our places at the IKEA table. To march or not to march. To bareback or not to bareback. To marry or not to marry. The give-and-take freedom of the early Gay Liberation movement has been replaced by the lock-and-load fear of the late Gay Market.

* Orgiastic Surgery. This is not a surgical procedure but a daily practice. It involves more leg swinging, deep breathing, and eye rolling than a Falun Gong rally at Tiananmen Square. It is fantastic, nonmonastic, and can be quite gymnastic. It is also iconoclastic because it reminds us that we have a body, that we are part of a sexual revolution. A healthful side effect is the production of the elasticity recommended above.

A postscript--this is my last Advocate column of the 1900s, and I know I join lesbian and gay people everywhere in the hope that the first child of 2000 will be born to a lesbian mother. I long for the New Year's Day in-hospital Today show interview. We'll see Katie Couric ask the new lesbian mother. "Have you thought of a name for her?"

Momazon: "Yes, we will call her Rapture."

Unless those evangelicals were right, see you next millennium!