"[Goad is] deeply humanistic," says Charles Boucher of Portland's Counter Media, which played host to the tour. "He's a good writer, very insightful and funny."

"I think he brings a lot to the small press community," says Ilse Thompson, owner of Confounded Books in Seattle, where Goad signed copies of the "Rape Issue." "[He] did a spoken word thing that was just great."

"Someone took a dump on someone's face," says Los Angeles Mondo Video employee Randy Smith of the tour's stop at the store, which he missed. "I never saw anyone take a dump on anyone else."

Goad has since dropped out of the Angry White Male Tour after appearing for most of its West Coast dates — in an e-mail interview, he cites "irreconcilable aesthetic and personality differences with the promoter." The group also included Mike Diana, described as "America's only convicted cartoonist." There were other zinesters like King VelVeeda of cheesygraphics.com. The musical guests included Skitzo, whose performance, according to Stevie Mickelson, head sound engineer at Dante's in Portland, involved "puk(ing) in some kind of tool thing." But audiences weren't necessarily turning out to watch "Puketeria." "The main draw is Jim Goad," said Boucher.

Goad is a local fixture in Portland, where he lives, writes and was convicted in 1999 of beating his girlfriend Sky Ryan bloody. Ryan, who told Willamette Week that she had broken Goad's window and threatened the writer via answering machine prior to the attack, was the aggressor according to Goad's account, allegedly starting the incident by punching him in the face. The Willamette Week article also mentioned that he had taken out a restraining order against her.

But Goad's gleeful post-incident description implies a political context that could be construed as more than self-defense. "In case anyone was wondering, I don't feel the least bit sorry about it," he told an interviewer at Sick Puppy Comix, in a piece to which his site links. "The Draconian punishment I've been handed goes far beyond the biblical admonition of `an eye for an eye.' If I'm going to pay for the crime so heavily, I might as well savour sweet memories of it. I might as well fondly recall the sound of her squealing for her life and the sight of her blood spraying through the air like slow motion photography of a sneeze. Women who hit like boys should expect to get hit back like boys. Isn't that what equality's all about?"

He's often described as daring. Controversial. Politically incorrect. But his most salient feature may be how little controversy he attracts for his views. For the whole time he was on tour with The Angry White Males, he says, the only thing that could have been interpreted as protest was "some hecklers in the audience." He even says that his attempts to start a debate with "three unhappy-looking women," one wearing a "Men Lie" shirt, fizzled. While he might not be universally loved ("None of the zine people I know likes him," says Santa Barbara Zine Fest organizer Lynne Lowe) he's respected enough by enough people that he generally has no problem getting his message out.

There was the obscenity trial a few years back, where a bookseller who carried ANSWER Me! was successfully defended by the ACLU, but the generally positive and neutral responses his tour received point to a man not out of place in the zine community and other closely related cultures. A hard-working Aryan Nation scribe or white power band might labor in obscurity for years, never once being invited for an appearance at, say, South by Southwest or the Knitting Factory. Not so Goad, who is clearly well-known and even respected in the independent arts culture.

One obvious difference between him and the Aryan Nation activist, Goad and many of his fans have argued, is that much of his most provocative work is meant as satire. Boucher, for instance, rails against "popular conceptions" of Goad's work, arguing that you'd have to be a "dullard" to belive that his misogynistic rants are meant to be taken at face value.

Goad told an interviewer that "Let's Hear It for Violence Toward Women," possibly his most controversial piece ever, was "intended as a JOKE." The sprawling 1,411-word essay is all over the map. Most of it can be loosely interpreted as a parody of the ham-handed oppressors Goad imagines feminists imagine all men to be. (Still following?) "I destroy everything that's important to women. I smash their glass figurines and rip the stuffing out of their teddy bears. Then I shred their love letters into little ribbons as they watch and cry."

Some of the piece, though, puts forth observations that Goad clearly stands behind. "The female gender's biggest flaw is their notion that women are somehow more moral, noble, and sacred than men." In fact, he says virtually the same thing over e-mail, when asked if he is a misogynist: "If one is automatically a misogynist when they question the notion of innate female innocence and the idea that women are incapable of malice, lying, and violence, then register me as a misogynist." Since "Let's Hear It" is all written in the same voice, it's hard to tell what's Jim Goad and what's his straw-male-oppressor persona.

And much of the essay is simply graphic depictions of violence that seem intended to shock. "Such a sweet little girl. So annoying. Daddy's little snookums. Now you're wiping the blood off your mouth. What would your father say if he saw me smack the snot out of your nose and onto the walls? Would he cry? Would he call the cops?" But what is it supposed to shock you into? Deciding that Goad is right, that feminists overstate the problem of domestic violence?

The piece has apparently shocked many in the alternative media into making Goad an in-demand speaker, oft-published writer and radio talk show host. His articles have appeared in the New York Press and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He's published "The Redneck Manifesto," a 1998 book dissecting societal attitudes toward lower-income whites. He currently hosts a Saturday show on KGUY in Portland. By all accounts, he's a member of the press in good standing, or at least as good as can be expected.

The store owners, festival organizers and nightclub booking agents whose establishments played host to the Angry White Male Tour are a varied group. Not all of them were well-versed in the work of Goad or his former tour-mates. "I really didn't know anything about the Angry White Male Tour," says San Antonio Underground Film Festival director Adam Rocha, who also says he had never before heard of Goad. "It seemed like a good idea at the time." But many specifically welcomed Goad. "I'm a fan of Jim Goad," says Matt Shapiro, a promoter with Kimo's in San Francisco. "I'm just into the extreme...People like to be shocked." "I wanted to have Jim Goad in here," says Confounded Books' Thompson. "People love it here," says Dante's sound engineer Mickelson of the reception Goad's oeuvre gets in Portland.

Regardless of whether you agree with Goad, the argument goes, he has an opinion. To fail to extend him a forum to present that opinion is tantamount to censorship. This makes some kind of sense for Santa Barbara Zine Fest's Lowe, who says that anyone who applies for a half-table to display work at her event gets one unless the zinester has disrupted a previous year's festival. But it gets harder to argue that having an opinion entitles one to high-profile appearances at clubs and bookstores. "Whether anyone agrees with his methods, he has one," says Thompson. "I definitely think they have a lot of points of view to expose," says Shapiro of Goad and the other Angry White Males.

And his hosts tend to agree that Goad is not the woman-hater he's accused of being — or if he is, it doesn't matter. "I guess I don't really think that's relevant," says Thompson. Boucher doesn't see him as a domestic abuser — "It was a case of mutual battery," he says. When Shapiro is asked whether a Goad-like performance artist believed to be a white power activist would be quite as popular, he reacts by mentioning not the "Rape Issue" but rather Goad's writing on the subject of class in America. "There's a big difference between white power and (writing about) the oppression of a class of people." Says Lowe, "That's his persona. That's his image."

Even if you're willing to give Goad's words the meticulous, nuanced reading he and his fans demand, though, it's hard to pin down what the real Goad believes. When asked whether his persona is, well, a persona, he rejects what he sees as a false dichotomy. "Jesus Christ, let's stop it with the binary thinking! It's not either 'all a satire' or 'all serious.' But I bristle at the idea that I'm hiding behind a persona, because, if anything, I suffer for my sincerity." The over-5,000-word intro to the "Rape Issue" is nominally anti-rape, or at least not pro-rape, but involves purple-prose descriptions of the act that may or may not be intended as irony. He continually stresses that the assault he was convicted of was in self defense, but in an interview linked to his site, he admits to hitting his late ex-wife Debbie when she didn't heed his warning "that I was getting angry." This is the same Debbie who worked on ANSWER Me! throughout its tenure and whom he's variously described, approvingly, as "more of a misogynist than I ever can hope to be" and later, less so, as "next to worthless as a working partner."

Does he contradict himself? Very well, then, he contradicts himself. To his literary and journalistic admirers, that just proves that Jim Goad is large, that he must contain multitudes.

E-mail Julia Lipman at julia@flakmag.com.