No Pain, No Gain

In 1971, Cohen relocated the American Bidet Co. to Miami. After five years, he moved to Hollywood, where business was never great but the company muddled along. "We lived comfortably," Cohen says. His sign in North Miami, featuring a little man riding the crest of a powerful bidet, became an iconic curiosity along I-95.

Meanwhile, the device took off in Japan. A company called Toto Ltd. in 1980 spun Cohen's device off as the "washlet." By 1985, according to an article in Japan Times, 30 Japanese companies were doing business in bidets. "They don't realize they are sitting on top of a great revelation for mankind," the newspaper quoted Cohen as saying.

These days, Asian takeoffs on Cohen's doodad are top sellers, while Cohen continues to manufacture his line of bidets at his factory store in Weston. He sells them nationwide through his website (bidet.com) and in several major cities. But it's hard to keep up.

Recently, bidets have gone high-tech. In 2006, American manufacturer Kohler unveiled its C-3 toilet seat (cleanliness, comfort, convenience). Retailing for $1,300, it has nozzles front and rear and three remote-control settings for temperature, pressure, and seat heat. Blue LED lights detect darkness and illuminate the inside of the bowl. Then there's the de-odorizer. "There's a built-in fan that draws air out of the bowl, runs it through a charcoal filter, and blows it out a rear exhaust," says Shane Allis, senior project manager for toilet seats at the Kohler Corp.

Kohler's sales have been climbing. Toto's washlet has sold more than 17 million units. And Cohen?

"My numbers are dwarfed by that," he says. "I couldn't have topped a few hundred thousand."

Yet Cohen looks forward to brighter days ahead with a new advertising campaign and a new, hand-held, jet-stream attachment (to be used before and after romantic encounters) that he hopes will be installed in thousands of hotel rooms across the country. In the midst of ending a 40-year marriage, Cohen adds that he is also "in the market for a new Mrs. Bidet."

Been Good to Know Ya

So televangelist the Rev. D. James Kennedy, who wanted to "Reclaim America for Christ" by promoting hard-right politics and turning back the clock on social issues like gay rights, is gone.

Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, wasn't a phrase-maker like his local pal the Rev. O'Neal Dozier, who once described homosexuality as "something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit." But he used the power of his pulpit to stigmatize gays, spreading the perception that they were immature beings ("little boys looking for a daddy to love them," Kennedy called them) who just had to be encouraged to make the right choices.

Tailpipe wasn't surprised that Kennedy's death didn't inspire a lot of lamentation by South Florida's gay-rights activists. Wayne Besen, executive director of the Miami-based organization Truth Wins Out, issued a statement that summed up an apparently widespread sentiment, but in a comparatively civilized tone.

"It is never easy to lose a loved one, and those who took comfort in Kennedy's sermons will surely miss him," Besen said. That was followed with a quick "However...

"We must also recognize that Kennedy was a great source of pain for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans," Besen wrote.

"I think Reverend Kennedy hurt a lot of people," Besen said in a phone interview. "His message was that a certain group of people were inferior to other people. It was gratuitously mean-spirited. 'Reclaiming America for Christ' — what would America look like if he'd accomplished his goals? We'd be the Christian version of Iran."

Besen takes particular issue with one of Kennedy's marquee issues: that, if gay people wanted to become heterosexuals, all they'd have to do was make the right moral choices. John Paulk appeared on a 1998 Newsweek cover as a kind of poster boy for the notion of "ex-gays." When Besen saw Paulk walking into a D.C. gay bar in 2000, he took a photo and made international news. It's important to expose such hypocrisy, Besen says, because the idea that someone can change his sexual orientation is dangerous. Closeted gay kids have contemplated suicide because Christians like Kennedy make them feel so ashamed, he's said. Besides, that's consumer fraud, Besen contends. "They're promising people a product they can't deliver — and delivering disasters they never promised."