History isn’t only about the winners: it’s about the big moments. Personal plights and small-scale victories can often be lost like individual grains of sand through the hourglass. Gay Liberation focuses on the game-changing plays: the battle between the gays and the Smoke Monster during the Stonewall Riots, Anita Bryant getting her head lopped off by sword-wielding Steve Reeves after he blinded her with the haze off his pecs, the American Psychiatric Association classifying Christianity as a morbid but curable form of sexual arousal toward ghosts and zombies, and the Daughters of Bilitis raiding Los Angeles to rescue Barbara Walters from Roy Cohn. And that was just the 19th Century!

You’d think by the time we got around to the 1980s that things wouldn’t have sucked so hard, but certain members of our population still labored under the bondage of exploitation and sexual contortionism masquerading as fitness. There was a time when gay, MacGyver-haired strippers were little more than chattel, forced to don sensible cotton panties and strive back-breakingly to autofellate themselves for the enjoyment of heterosexual women — their lives a personal hell of dry ice and Easy Listening crap rock under the dominion of a purring, insatiable female overlord commanding “Split your legs!” It was just like a reverse macho piggism take on Right Wing wank fodder like The Handmaiden’s Tale or The Chronicles of Gor. So you know it bit!

And so E.M.D.A.A.A., Exotic Male Dancers Against Autocratic Autofellatio — they could’ve opted for just two As, but “The extra A is for extra againstment!,” they rallied — was formed clandestinely during the summer of ’84 in an effort to fight the power and lobby for Money Shaker rights. The group’s leader? One Brian Buffster (left) — the unheralded, forgotten Kunta Kinte of Gay Rights — who told the Establishment to “Kiss my tight ass, Bluntfuck!” and set a ripple effect of rioting and civil disobedience into effect.

Though the group may have fallen into unjust obscurity since, his contributions are still felt today. Men like him entered the workforce, cornering the market on starring in soaps, impregnating imploding pop starlets, reading from a Teleprompter on CNN, being photographed holding hands with Marc Jacobs, hosting the Miss Teen U.S.A. Pageant, playing Hilary Duff‘s boyfriends in Disney movies, and doing gay porn to pay for chiropractic school.

In a world of true social justice, his face — not that lanky, bone-faced dude — would grace a G-string-stuffable fi’ dolla bill.

© 2010, An Unpaid Intern. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com