A Dirt Digging Dad's Bisexual Substack
Finally running my big mouth for fun and profit
My pen name is Kazmierz Ballaski, and I’m the Democratic opposition researcher in Chicago who habitually couldn’t keep his big mouth shut. If that doesn’t tell you who I am or how to find me, all you need to know is I go through politicians’ dirty laundry to pay my bills, and I’m better at digging dirt than paying my bills or life.
A long time ago I got a really bizarre idea about my job. Opposition researchers are the embarrassing open secret any credible political campaign in the U.S. hires anyway. Politicians need us, but hate accountability, so despite having our hands on almost all the political content you see on the tv or internet, you mostly never see us. When we wind up in the news, something has probably gone wrong.
So of course, I decided to market my skills by talking all about them.
It worked, sort of. I wound up quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Vice. I did things like fill out a census form for a right-wing Congressperson who claimed the census tracked private information. I wrote so much about the research process that it was eminently possible to use it as a guide for people new to the process. I got a reputation as a straight shooter, as I critiqued Democratic figures and behavior just as much as Republicans. A reporter once called me “a one man trade association for opposition research.”
Except it was also a total disaster.
Anyone who’s worked for more than a few days in Democratic politics knows that political reality isn’t West Wing, but Veep with more drinking. Many of us have one or more characters we relate to in the freewheeling, painfully funny HBO series. I myself was Gary Walsh, the eponymous veep’s hapless body person: clearly on the autism spectrum, effortlessly competent at my specialty, and constantly bulldozed in an almost completely unregulated social hurricane, where might inevitably makes right, and the word of mouth is the word of God. Gary is always left behind: the series closes on it, as he slumps over the coffin of his former presidential employer, his life in ruins, wondering where he went wrong.
Yeah, that’s me. I just wrote all the attacks instead of running around with a handbag, and my attempts to climb the socio-professional ladder inevitably ended in disaster.
Humans are social animals, and politics is social warfare, complete with its own unspoken laws with very serious consequences. My job is the acquisition of knowledge, but as another famous HBO show said, knowledge isn’t power; power is power. Me using my specialized knowledge for myself, rather than handing it off to a media consultant or communications director, was akin to an arms dealer suddenly opening fire on everyone in sight, including his own customers. My straight talk soured as I kept writing and talking, annoying and even infuriating more and more Democrats with real money and influence.
My social obliviousness makes me great at opposition research: I not only don’t care about offending sacred cows, I don’t even know they exist a lot of the time. But it also makes me terrible at judging how to use what I find.
It was, of course, more complicated than that: I’ve also been an alcoholic since I was in college, with all of the rampant instability and mood swings that come with it. Even worse, I sobered up halfway into my career, which is extremely rare in a field that still features liquid lunches and “wine snobs” who down entire bottles at a time. Just like that, I was even more isolated, having cut myself off from one of the biggest sources of marketing and new business for consultants.
Then there was the fact that I’m a male survivor. A year after I quit drinking for good, I stumbled bleeding and sobbing from a first marriage that featured constant domestic violence, and in the final years rape as well. Beyond hiking up my regular meltdowns and mood swings to operatic levels, there isn’t any space for a male survivor in an ecosystem where #YesAllMen is a literal moneymaker, and fundraisers wait for #MeToo incidents to blast out for online donations. My attempts to fit into the existing framework for survivors made things even worse: after I wrote about facing and witnessing sexual harassment in the workplace, my calls stopped getting returned entirely. Absolutely no one wants a cannon loose enough to actually do what every straight white woman on the internet demands men should do.
It got real, real bad. Driving Lyft for grocery money and landing in court for unpaid child support bad.
Then one day I blurted out that I’m bisexual, and things started to get better.
As it turns out, when you have a logjam deep in your brain clamping down on who you are, everything else piles up behind it. Within months of coming out to myself, I finally asked my psychiatrist about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and was promptly diagnosed with a severe case of it. A year after that, I admitted to myself I’m only slightly short of my older non-verbal son on the autism spectrum, and that I’d been doing things really, really wrong for most of my career.
Shortly after that, I wiped my entire social media presence under my real name, and all of the political content I actually controlled, as a condition of landing a major, and ultimately successful, client. And finally, slowly, I started to get back on my feet.
By that, I mean that I ended my marriage to a schoolteacher, slept with twice the U.S. lifetime partner average in four months, both men and women, and cut ties with a huge chunk of my social circle rather than explain myself.
Yeah, I’m still autistic and weird. And I didn’t shut my big mouth, either.
Instead of trying to fit into a world that clearly wanted me as a disposable resource in the best of times, I came up with this pseudonym on Medium, and started writing things for me. No more politics; I’ve never even liked politics, past the love of unraveling its impossibly complex problems for their own sake. Instead, I wrote what I wanted: queer erotica, queer dating, and queer identity. I had a lot of catching up to do, after all.
No one likes a gadfly, but doing odd bisexual things as a bisexual man is fine. I raised approving eyebrows among colleagues and acquaintances taking a man to the Equality Illinois Pride brunch, after a long career of eye rolls and shrugs. As a straight white man with a lot of personal problems, I was essentially dog food whenever it came time to parcel out the spoils of identity politics. But my mess is on the light side when it comes to outcomes among queer men. Most men like me- bisexual, autistic, alcoholic father and grandfather, born in the Deep South in Cancer Alley- don’t wind up where I am. They mostly end up dead or in jail. And as problematic and trashy as the liberal coalition known as the Democratic Party is, most people at least hold their fire when actual breathing LGBTQ people show up. Our old rich queens are an ATM for party fundraising, after all; that was one of the few things West Wing nailed.
And in the meantime, running my mouth about my own stuff has worked out rather well.
I’ve always been terrible at writing to the tastes of others. My attempt at a fantasy novel went nowhere after a year of querying; Zoroastrian alt history doesn’t exactly scream best-seller. My experiments in political interest writing were equally dismal: people get into politics to comfort themselves and belong to something, and my habit of slicing what few clothes the emperor wears to ribbons comforts few. Even my attempts at fan fiction were lackluster, for the simple reason that I was a middle aged, sexually active queer man in a sea of virgin and near-virgin straight women under 25.
But once I actually wrote about my tastes and my life as it was, and not as I guessed others wanted me to seem, I took off. Before I’d finished my first erotica series on Medium, I had enough followers to get paid for it. Six months of smut, dating advice, and personal essays later, I can almost pay my cell phone bill with it, and that was with basically zero marketing or promotion.
So here I am, Substack. If you’ve received this, you’re among my best guesses for who in my personal network might want to read it. It is of course just a guess, and I begrudge no one their tastes. Spread the word, or kill it dead; we all have our lives to live.
How it works is this: my rambling is free, but the good stuff costs you. The gawkers will see a range of short non-fiction on queerness and identity, from the difference between dating men versus women, to masculinity with a side of 21st century existentialism. The cool kids will get all the thirsty queer smut you never knew you needed, whether from my first divorce rebound with a coming-out fantasy, or of a bisexual awakening in medieval Nepal. The updates for both will be weekly, including some updated content from my existing Medium writing.
I’m a puzzling asterisk to most preconceptions. Most men struggle to connect at all in online dating…except to me it’s so effortless that I’m still vaguely puzzled about the fuss. Most bisexual men stay in monogamous straight relationships forever…except I set fire to my straight marriage for slutty queer polyamory. To most men, #MeToo is a retweet to avoid getting canceled….except for me, it’s a statement of fact. Conventional wisdom usually has one of two answers for me: “That sucks and I got nothing,” or “I wasn’t talking about you.”
There’s nothing to do for it but write down the wisdom myself. Stay tuned for horny disaster.
Love your writing!