Stop Me If You've Heard This One Already: So, Carl Paladino Walks Into a Lesbian Bar...

Morgan Schweitzer

One of them was reported yesterday in the hometown Buffalo News where an Erie County legislator named Betty Jean Grant told a press conference that when she was on the Buffalo Common Council a few years ago, Paladino allegedly told her and other African-Americans they were "not fit" to serve on the Council. "Instead of serving in the Council Chamber, they should be cleaning the Council Chamber," Grant quoted Paladino as saying.

Paladino's response: "That's "total BS. She's got a great imagination. I never said that."

Maybe so, but Grant's story pales beside the one told by a local lesbian comedian named Kristen Becker, whose You-Tubed tale of Paladino's late night excursion to a gay bar a few years ago is still getting plenty of traffic, two weeks after it was first posted by WNYmedia.net, the mischevious Web site that first revealed Paladino's naughty and nasty emails for the world. The folks at WNY say they found "numerous and verified accounts of the incident," though Paladino's team told Maggie Haberman that it was "a lame smear attempt from a partisan Web blog with an unhealthy obsession with Carl Paladino."

At any rate, despite earlier accounts of this exchange, this is a story where only the Voice will bring you the full unexpurgated version, as Becker tells it in the video:

"Mr. Paladino came in at abt 2:30 in the morning --- shit-hammered. At Roxy's, which you may or may not know, used to be a lesbian bar... a dancer, Rebecca, walked by and he said 'Show me your pussy!" Honest to god, and I went, 'Whoaa buddy, I need to ask you to back up. He looked at me and said, 'Shut up you fucking dyke. Don't quit your day job.' So I said, get this fucker out of here. I kicked him out. But they let him back in of course, he's Carl Paladino."