Walter Huss's Christian Ventriloquist friend Jim Bisel could have either written a song called "Porno Gravy" or gone to therapy. You'll never guess which one he chose!
Episode 3 of "Walter Huss and the best people"
This is the 3rd installment of a series about some of the more hateful and toxic people in US History I’ve learned about thanks to my research on Walter Huss, the chair of the OR GOP in 1978-9. Installment 1 was about Dale Benjamin, a PNW fascist activist whose career traced an arc from the 2nd KKK to the Silver Shirts to the National States Rights Party to a group of young Portland neo-Nazis he mentored in the 1960s to George Wallace. Installment 2 was about Richard Barrett, a white supremacist activist and trainer of racist skinhead terrorists from Mississippi who dined with Huss in 1990 at a Sizzlers on Portland’s MLK Blvd. when Huss was leading the charge to remove MLK’s name from that street—for totally not-racist reasons, of course.
Both Benjamin and Barrett were clownish figures in many ways, though also violently hateful and menacing. Jim Bisel (1930-2011), the Christian ventriloquist who is the subject of this installment, was also clownish, but often in a more playful and innocuous way than either Benjamin or Barrett. He was the kind of person who could, for example, tone down his homophobia and law-and-order-bloodlust in the name of providing an evening of kitschy entertainment for a Gen X Portland wedding in the mid-1990s.1 He’s the kind of guy you could hire to send a totally apolitical, singing-ventriloquist-in-a-gorilla-suit telegram to a friend for their birthday. Bisel’s actions from the 1960s into the early 2000s had a far less damaging impact on the people around him than those of Benjamin or Barrett, but like Huss, he helped build a far right, nominally “Christian,” political culture animated by an existential fear and hatred of a shadowy “internal enemy.” In his hundreds of performances in churches around the state for almost 50 years, Bisel invited his young audiences into a smiling and playful world in which Christians like them could come to understand the dire imperative of fighting back against the evil internal forces of abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and liberalism that were supposedly out to destroy “good Americans like us.”
So while Jim Bisel is an absurd and even comical historical figure, he’s worth our attention as an articulator and disseminator of a fairly common form of grassroots “conservatism” ca. 1960-2000.
Jim Bisel’s song “Porno Gravy” caps off a collection of 16 anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-military, Christian patriotic songs that he self-published in 1994. The screenshots I’ve shared here are from Walter Huss’s personal copy. The 4/4/97 at the top refers to the date that Huss received this from his friend and political associate of over 35 years, Jim Bisel.
As you can tell from Bisel’s description of his song book’s mission, he shared Huss’s right wing populist vision of the country as well as his belief that Christians should prosper both in this world and the next. “We” are the good people, the “real Americans” who are being victimized and ridiculed by some shadowy group of others who think they’re better than us and are entitled to rule the country. But fear not, the “sleeping giant” of the silent majority will soon roar back into power and restore God’s order on earth, just as the terribly disrespected founding fathers had intended it. And those “Investment Opportunities Unlimited” God promised will surely soon bear spiritual and material fruit for true believers like us.
The picture below is the first item in Huss’s chronologically arranged “Bisel” file. It appears to be a professional portrait Bisel had made in the early 1960s when he was getting his start in the Christian ventriloquist business.
I don’t know when Bisel and Huss met each other, but their first public venture together was in the summer of 1964 when they recorded this campaign song for Barry Goldwater.
A decade later Bisel wrote a few campaign songs that he sent to Ronald Reagan in 1976 along with some meandering advice, derived from his experience selling insurance to resistant customers, about how Reagan could defeat Ford in the GOP primary. Huss saved these documents in his “Reagan” file because he and Bisel worked together as part of the Oregon GOP effort to promote Reagan over Ford at the 1976 Kansas City convention. While almost the entire OR GOP establishment fully backed Ford and were quite skeptical about this effort to elevate Reagan, grassroots conservatives like Huss and Bisel regarded Ford as a RINO whose selection of Nelson Rockefeller as his VP proved that he was no friend to true Christian Patriot Conservatives.
America started on its knees, and that is how we stand…the figurative language might need some workshopping I’d say.
Bisel had a wide-ranging career as a ventriloquist. He warmed up audiences for Merv Griffin in Los Angeles and performed for luminaries like Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Pat Boone, and Burl Ives. He also ran a singing telegram service in Portland and performed on TV, at kids birthday parties, at churches, and weddings. When he wasn’t working at his day job as an insurance salesman, he was entertaining folks at nursing homes by putting on a gorilla costume and imitating Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.
Albany Democrat, 5 April 1984.
But behind Bisel’s surface jollity lay a profound sense that something was deeply wrong in America. Take, for example, his 1991 song about a rich doctor who, like Hitler, wants to kill Bisel’s mother. I can only imagine how Jim in his oversized bowtie with Tony or Tonya on his knee delivered this incredibly dark song.
It’s noteworthy that the song starts out lamenting the entirely made up idea that a doctor wants to kill his mother because she has cataracts, and then ends with the suggestion that it’s about time for good people like him to “do some weeding” to stop this Hitler-esque killing that traces its roots to abortion. It’s probably not a coincidence that it was precisely at this time, the early 1990s, that portions of the anti-abortion movement were becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea that abortion providers (aka, “killers of babies”) might be legitimately murdered in the name of saving lives.
In 1982 Bisel had appeared on a program for an anti-ERA event with one such defender of “godly pro-life” murder—Oregon Eagle Forum leader, chair of the Marion County GOP, and future state legislator Marilyn Shannon.
In 1993, ten years after this anti-ERA event, Marilyn Shannon spoke at an anti-LGBTQ Oregon Citizens Alliance gathering where she offered “praise and a prayer” for “Army of God” member Shelley Shannon who had just tried to murder abortion provider George Tiller. You probably recognize Tiller’s name because he was later shot at again and this time murdered by one of Shelley Shannon’s admirers in 2009.
[Kind of an aside here, but Marilyn Shannon’s public praise for Shelley Shannon (no relation) caused a small bit of trouble for John McCain in 2008 when it came out that he was the headlining speaker at that 1993 OCA event where Marilyn had praised Shelley. McCain’s speech followed immediately after Marilyn’s endorsement of “pro-life” terroristic violence. This will come as a shock I know, but the straight shooting maverick who chose Sarah Palin for his VP in 2008 passed over Marilyn Shannon’s 1993 pro-terrorist comments in silence. McCain had agreed to help the OCA, a far right hate group, raise funds in return for their pledge not to primary pro-choice Republican Senator Bob Packwood from the right in 1992. Packwood narrowly won reelection in ‘92, and very well may have lost in the primary to a right wing opponent who would have then been trounced in the general election by the strong Democratic candidate, Les AuCoin.]
So we’ve established that Jim Bisel seemed to indulge some violent fantasies about doing harm to people like doctors who he falsely claimed wanted to do harm to people Bisel loved. I’m not a therapist, but I strongly suspect that if he saw one they might have encouraged him to critically examine his obsession with *other peoples’* violent urges.
Now let’s sample some of Mr. Bisel’s thoughts about the sexual behavior of people he regarded as ungodly.
Again, not a therapist…but I’m sorry, what sort of non-therapy-needing person writes a song about force feeding Bill Clinton’s semen to crying children who you can’t save because you’re dead? Jim, my man, how about more gorilla-suited Kenny Rogers and less of whatever the heck this is?
Just because you say gay people are going to burn in hell, they call you a homophobe and a hate monger! Can you believe that? Jim Bisel, who entertained children in churches as a vocation and wrote his 1955 thesis at Western Evangelical Seminary on Christian education, thinks that other people who chose to work with children are engaged in acts of domination, seeking to force others “to bow” to their wishes. [Very therapist voice] Interesting…tell me more about that.
Again, not a therapist, but it’s notable how people who are 100% opposed to homosexuality and pornography spend so much time thinking and talking about homosexuality and pornography.
Jim Bisel is one of the many “grassroots conservatives” who, like his long-time friend Walter Huss, embodies the variety of “conservative” who went from Goldwater to George Wallace to Reagan enthusiast to GHWB skeptic to “America First” Pat Buchanan enthusiast in ‘92 and beyond. The flier below is from the 1996 GOP primary when Bisel and Huss supported Buchanan over the presumptive nominee, Bob Dole.
Had Bisel or Huss lived into the Trump era, I suspect their trajectory would have been similar to that of their anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ compatriot Marilyn Shannon, who in April 2022 had this picture taken with one of her heroes, Mike Flynn, when Flynn’s Reawaken America/election denialist/Christian Nationalist tour came through Oregon.
Consider how much ink was spilled in 2016-17 about the Never Trump conservatives who never saw Trump coming and were shocked that this could happen to their party. If only our pundit class had devoted even a fraction of that attention to the very large cohort of self-described “movement conservatives” like Shannon or Mike Johnson for whom Trump was a long-awaited deliverance, a returning home of the GOP to what they’d always hoped it would be.
Coda: On the wider, wilder, and even weirder world of Cold War Era Christian Ventriloquism
When I first stumbled upon Jim Bisel I thought “Christian Ventriloquist, what an original niche that guy carved out for himself.” But it turns out that Christian Ventriloquism was all the rage from the 1950s into the 1980s. There was even a whole market for albums by Christian ventriloquists! I know, I know, you’re thinking “doesn’t the whole non-visual nature of a recorded album kind of miss the point of a ventriloquist act?” But if you’ve taken one leap of faith already, is it really that much of an ask to take one more?
When I posted this Beverly Massegee album on Bluesky someone mentioned that she’d been a Dallas stripper who worked for Jack Ruby, who then starred in a 1965 adult film, and then married a small-time Dixie mobster who was murdered, and then found God, and then told a JFK conspiracy theorist in 1970 that she was “the Babushka Lady” who filmed the JFK assassination close up but whose film disappeared after being taken by the FBI because it supposedly blew the cover on the CIA conspiracy to murder JFK. Did you follow that? Anyway…IT’S ALL TRUE. I mean, I’m 99% sure she was lying about being the Babushka Lady and the JFK/CIA thing. But that foundational lie aside, the rest of Beverly Oliver-McGann-Massegee’s story is true.
Beverly found God in 1970, right around the time her mobster husband was murdered. Depending on which version of her life story you believe, she was either tied down and forced to take heroin by her husband’s evil cronies, or she became an addict on her own and then was able to kick the habit with God’s help. Regardless, within a few months of her mobster husband’s gruesome death, she was harvesting souls at a gospel a-go-go in Houston.
Lubbock Avalanche Journal, 30 January 1971
Within months of her debut at the Gospel a-go-go in Houston, she married Southern Baptist Charles Massegee, a third generation preacher who wrote a 1974 book called Five Minutes to Midnight that claimed that Jesus was on the verge of returning to earth, rapturing up all the good Christians, and condemning to eternal hellfire all who did not fit in that category. [Massegee is still spreading this same urgent message about the immanent end of the world in 2023. As far as I know, he has not provided an explanation for why the confident predictions in his 1974 book did not materialize.]
The Massegee’s traveled the country with Charles preaching about the approaching end times while former stripper and porn star Beverly entertained kids as a “manipulator” (her word) of her dummy friend Erick. Needless to say, the Massegee’s needed to do a little massaging of Beverly’s back story because it was a family-oriented show after all.
“Supper club entertainer” is quite the euphemism, and I’ve been able to find no evidence that Beverly Oliver, who began performing at strip clubs right around the age of 18, was ever Miss Texas. This is just one of several apparent embellishments to her pre-salvation history that I’ve encountered in her public accounts of her own past.
The Massegees seem to have made a good living as traveling evangelists with Crusade for Christ. This story from the Charlotte Observer of 30 September 1993 tells the tale of Beverly’s salvation and how her almost certainly apocryphal story about having been introduced in 1963 to Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby made her a much-sought-after commodity amongst JFK conspiracy mongers like Oliver Stone.
As with any story involving JFK’s assassination, there are an endless series of dubious rabbit holes one could go down…but suffice it to say that I highly doubt that Beverly Massegee was the “Babushka Lady.” When she met conspiracy theorist Gary Shaw at a Texas revival meeting in 1970, barely over her heroin addiction and trying to figure out what came next now that her mobster husband was dead, she probably heard Shaw say something about the mysterious Babushka Lady and decided in the moment to claim that she was the Babushka Lady. She lived in Dallas at the time of JFK’s assassination, right? Seems plausible, until, that is, people started trying to corroborate her story. But once that cat was out of the bag, there was no way to put it back in, and so she kept back filling all sorts of nonsense to try to make the story semi-plausible. But the good thing about being a hero to conspiracy theorists is that if you tell them what they want to hear, they’ll forgive you a few oopsies, like claiming that you used a type of camera to film the 1963 assassination that did not exist until 1965.
In 1994 Beverly testified before the Assassination Records Review Board and stuck by her story despite it having tons of holes, but then she ended with this odd note about how if the whole story comes out and she's proven wrong then she'd be the first to apologize to the American people. Apologize? Proven wrong? About what?
Again, just speculation on my part here, but I think we see Beverly being honest in this testimony. She knows that if the real identity of the Babushka Lady comes out then she’ll be exposed as a liar, and should that happen she will apologize and perhaps admit that she told a little fib in 1970 to get attention but then it spiraled out of control such that there was no way she could reel it back in without disgracing herself, her husband, and the important work they were doing for God. And so she kept going with this one little lie in order to serve the greater Christian good (and make some money off the attention it garnered her).
I know this makes me old fashioned, but I think shameless public lying is a bad thing, even a disqualifying thing for people who hold any sort of position of influence or authority. That said, I also know it’s easy for people to convince themselves of something if they just say it enough times. Walter Huss publicly claimed multiple times that he was neither an antisemite nor a racist, and that was a lie. He rationalized that lie to himself because he thought that his antisemitic and racist ideas were true, and that it was the people calling him a bigot who were the real liars because they failed to acknowledge the “truths” that Huss knew. Similarly, Bisel, the happy-go-lucky gorilla-suit-wearing ventriloquist overflowing with Christian love, was genuinely shocked that people would call him a homophobe or a hate monger just because he was called by God to hate gay people.
This Righteous Gemstones-esque detour into the world of Christian ventriloquists has gone on long enough, so I’ll let Tennessee Williams have the last word…and that word is “mendacity.”
Back when I was active on Twitter I did a thread about Bisel and one of my followers from Portland chimed in to say “OMG, that guy performed at my wedding back in the 90s.” By his account there was nothing in the act Bisel did that marked him as political in any way.
Mike Johnson looks like he could have just come off the assembly line at the ventriloquist dummy factory.
Those ventriloquist/dummy photos are terrifying.