1 - The Word

Gerbil

Journalist Alan Salkin investigates the urban legend of Richard Gere allegedly inserting a gerbil into his rectum for sexual pleasure, traci

Key takeaways

• The gerbil rumor persists across generations despite no credible evidence, illustrating how myths spread through collective memory and humor.

Main topics

• Urban legends
• Cultural memory

Notable quotes

"Gerbil." – The word that triggers instant, often bizarre reactions.

Conclusion

The gerbil legend endures not because it's true, but because it reveal

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) No animals were hurt in the making of this podcast. Speaker 8 (0:06) Gerbil. Speaker 1 (0:09) I'm sorry? Speaker 8 (0:10) Gerbil. Speaker 3 (0:13) Okay. Speaker 4 (0:15) Go ahead. Speaker 3 (0:16) You're just going to say that word, gerbil? Speaker 4 (0:18) And I'm going to see what you say. Speaker 3 (0:21) Oh, not that. Speaker 2 (0:25) I'm Alan Salkin, a journalist. I've been doing a little experiment, saying the word gerbil to friends and strangers and recording their immediate reactions. Speaker 5 (0:36) I like gerbils. A rodent, a cardboard tube in somebody's butt. Speaker 8 (0:42) There's a rumor, an urban legend. You might or might not know it. For many people, the word pushes a button in the brain. It's fun and sometimes perplexing to watch what spills. There's Speaker 5 (0:57) a sinister underbelly to what really goes on in Hollywood. So out there, it's just a really deviant thing. Tom Cruise was putting gerbils up his butt. Speaker 3 (1:11) I thought it was Harrison Ford, perhaps even David Bowie. David Speaker 4 (1:14) Bowie? Speaker 5 (1:15) There was the actor who had the gerbil who used to play with that. Speaker 8 (1:20) For some, the association with the word is swift and certain because the Hollywood rumor that probably starts in the 1980s has never stopped circulating. Speaker 4 (1:32) So I'm going to say a word and see how you react, right? Speaker 2 (1:36) Gerbil. Speaker 4 (1:40) Richard Gere? Speaker 3 (1:41) Go Speaker 2 (1:44) on. Speaker 6 (1:45) That's all I know. I've never heard the word gerbil except for Richard Gere shoved one up his ass. Speaker 8 (1:54) That's the way I remember hearing the rumor too. The most common version is A-list celebrity Richard Gere showed up at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles requiring the emergency removal of a gerbil he'd inserted in his rectum for sexual pleasure. Speaker 8 (2:15) Some tellers enrich the story by describing the use of a cardboard paper towel roll to guide the gerbil inside. Others tell an extended version where the freed critter scampers around the ER. Duct tape and condoms are sometimes mentioned. Some people say they heard it happen not in L.A., but at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, and that it was in the 1990s or 1970s. My family moved to L.A. when I was nine, so I always heard the L.A. version. Evidence was hinted at. Someone knew a nurse or doctor who swears they were there, or who saw an x-ray. But no proof was presented, and I don't know when other people heard it, but I think I was just a kid, certainly not a professional fact checker. My adult career as a journalist spans both coasts and 30 years. Writing everything from exposés of courthouse corruption, to movie reviews, to trend stories about monocles, to a book on presidential politics. Speaker 5 (3:23) The new book, The Method to the Madness. Alan, why don't you start off with the concept for the book? What was the inspiration? Speaker 4 (3:30) Well, we have 114 on the record, no anonymous sources telling the story that Trump was incredibly intentional over a 15 year period in his plan and his strategy to become president. I've published Speaker 8 (3:44) three books and appeared in a dozen documentaries. One of those led to this podcast. Speaker 3 (3:53) The brand, the raw vegan queen. Bad Vegan Speaker 2 (3:57) is a Netflix doc based on my Vanity Fair article about a vegan restaurant owner who was apparently brainwashed by a con man who, among other things, told her he could make her pit bull immortal. Speaker 4 (4:10) The documentary Speaker 2 (4:16) was directed by Chris Smith, who interviewed me. If you want a visual, online commenters say I look like weird Adam Sandler. After doing my interview for the documentary, Chris and I started talking about strange things people believe. We got into the gerbil legend. Speaker 4 (4:35) Yeah, like, how did this become something that became Speaker 3 (4:39) known throughout in popular culture? Speaker 2 (4:42) I told Chris, I don't remember where I originally heard it. Maybe junior high school in the late 1970s? But for as long as I can remember, it's been in my brain as something that... maybe really happened? And then I'm like, wait, I don't know if it happened or not. And why do I care? And what else is in my memory that I can't trust? Is this the Mandela effect? Remembering something is real, even if it's not? Speaker 8 (5:13) Or is it an extremely long-running game of telephone where a joke about a pet gets twisted across a million retellings? I mean, it can't be true, can it? Speaker 3 (5:27) As you get older and you look back at something like that, it seems completely preposterous. So you're trying to figure out where would this have come and why and how would it have been propagated? Yeah. Speaker 8 (5:40) I consider making a podcast. What if I did the things I always do? Whether my topics are light or as weighty as a true crime murder investigation. Interview everyone involved, in this case doctors and maybe even Richard Gere if he'll do it. Dig through old archives and find everything there is. But would a gerbil investigation be a good thing? Speaker 5 (6:11) I mean, is this really something you want to dive into? Speaker 4 (6:17) You think it's beneath me? Speaker 5 (6:18) Yeah, this is like very New York Post. Speaker 5 (6:22) Style, National Enquirer, you know, supermarkets, sensationalism. Speaker 8 (6:30) Before committing to this endeavor, I call my friend Becky, a public relations pro who runs an animal welfare charity. Her actual last name is Wisdom, and she often has wisdom for me. Speaker 5 (6:42) Like, what's the idea here? You don't have, like, a sexy trend story to write for The Times? Speaker 2 (6:49) I'm that rare reporter who is on staff at both the noisy tabloid New York Post and the paper of record, the New York Times. Becky worries that I gravitate to the sensational over the substantive because I crave attention. I like to think I'm taken seriously. But what would I be risking investigating a legend about rodents and buttholes? and potentially exposing a movie star to further ridicule. In fact, my book about what happens behind the scenes at Food Network is under option by a big Hollywood production company. And I was told they are talking to Julia Roberts about starring in a scripted series based on it. Julia Roberts! But... Would she go forward with a project involving a journalist who mentions her pretty woman co-star this way? What will Bobby Flay think? Could I be ruining my career? Even if this podcast is a hit, what do I become? Oh yeah, that gerbil guy? Becky is asking the same. Speaker 5 (8:02) Come on. That gerbil Richard Gere, the whole thing. Right. Speaker 4 (8:09) I am thinking of doing a podcast about it. I find it interesting that I can say one word and this happens to people, just the name of an animal. If I say dog, then you think of different dogs you've known in your life, but gerbil. Whether you've owned a gerbil, you haven't owned a gerbil, you don't think about the rodent world or habit trails, you think of Richard Gere's butt. And I think there is something about the fact that there's this... story that starts before the internet that everybody knows somehow and still knows. It's like it came into your brain one time when you were like 11 years old. It did a twist and it stuck. And you can never get rid of it your whole life. Speaker 5 (8:55) Okay. Fair enough. So it's a deep dive. Speaker 8 (9:00) My initial research includes more than talking to friends and testing reactions to the word gerbil. I find a key voice in the history of American sexual practices has written about the rumor, so I Speaker 2 (9:14) also call him. In 1998, Dan Savage publishes what he says will be the only comment he will ever devote to the urban legend. Warning. Dan gets graphic when he talks about this stuff. Speaker 1 (9:30) Hundreds of thousands of men and women in this country, my fellow Americans, leave high school convinced that gay men put gerbils in their asses on a semi-regular basis. Gerbil stuffing is a sexual practice that straight teenage boys in general, and Howard Stern in particular, suspect gay men in general and Richard Gere, who is not gay in particular, of engaging in. Speaker 2 (9:50) For those not familiar with Dan, he writes Savage Love. an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column, and hosts a podcast called Savage Lovecast. It turns out that was not his last comment on the subject. Speaker 1 (10:08) Actually, I'm a little trepidatious about this interview. Speaker 2 (10:13) When I interview sex columnist Dan Savage, he's not exactly psyched at first. Speaker 1 (10:20) I'm a little wary because it feels like at the time I wrote the column that you sent to me about gerbils and gerbling, I would get that question every once in a while from a noxious teenager. Somebody