The most striking thing about the emails that Mark Foley sent a 16-year-old Congressional page is how much like a 16-year-old he sounds himself:

“I just emailed Will,” he writes, at full gush, not slowing to punctuate. “hes such a nice guy … acts much older than his age … and hes in really great shape … i am just finished riding my bike on a 25 mile journey now heading to the gym … whats school like for you this year?’”

It’s the sort of naive twittering you might find in a diary entry on MySpace. At any moment you expect the 52-year-old Congressman to tick off a list of his “likes” in the manner of the moonstruck girls on that site (”hugs, making friends, soda, cookies, marshmallows, music”) — but then, as if carried away by the momentum, adding “bubble butts, circle jerks…”

Some of the teenage pages Foley regularly emailed have since come forward and at least one said he was “freaked out” when the Congressman asked him to email back a photo of himself. But other young men apparently took the attentions in their stride. Access to power is a powerful thing, and the Congressional page program is intended to fan just this sort of uncritical youthful vigor.

Here’s how it works: Politics-minded high school students, usually from well-connected donor families, are given a chance to fetch and carry for their State representatives and see how imperial Washington operates. What it’s really about we see in the photo above: A surge of Congressional pages try to get close enough to the President to shake his hand, some way in the back and with no possible chance of contact but lunging eagerly forward, nevertheless — such is the intoxicant of absolute power.

In this respect, Mark Foley was no different from the object of what ABC Nightly News described as his “obsession with 16 and 17-year-old” males. Every year, on the day of the State of the Union address, Foley would camp out in the House of Representatives hours before the speech just to stake his claim on a valuable aisle seat — thus, making sure he got his picture taken shaking the president’s hand as Bush swept by.

Reports Amie Parnes of the Scripps-Howard New Service:

In his 12-years in Congress, [Foley] enjoyed brushes with celebrity. The photos in his congressional office are proof. There is one of Foley and Jay Leno. Right beside it is Foley and Clint Eastwood. At the Recording Academy event where he was honored, he had his picture taken with Kelly Clarkson, the American Idol champion, and Randy Jackson, the American Idol judge. “Isn’t this fun?” he cooed, as he posed for one of the pictures.

I am reminded here of another public person with a much too intimate interest in the young — Michael Jackson. In the notorious Bashir interview, which I wrote about at the time, as did most stunned culture watchers, Michael was very much the divine child. He climbed a tree, showed off his collection of Disney memorabilia for Peter Pan (”the boy who never grew up”) and went on merry-go-rounds in his backyard. His home, aptly named “Neverland,” was, in effect, a fully functioning amusement park. It was said he was making up for a childhood he never had. Colder eyes saw something else.

They saw the boy-bait in the bedroom — the pinball machines and other such arcade games, along with fully stocked, always-free candy machines that he kept for himself and the all-boy gang of nine-year-olds that he regularly had, in his words, “sleep over.”

Foley, in his emails, seems as much the provocative arrested teenager, as Michael, the freeze-dried Peter Pan. And both are linked, more than once, more than casually, with the exact age group their psychic equipment, easy enthusiasms and naive speech patterns resemble.

Freud called it the Return of the Repressed. When sexuality is bottled up, it has no alternative but to blast a hole in the system and steam out in its most scalding, fiery form. Were sex impulses — even those of the most unhealthy, self-damaging kind — expressed and allowed to find socially acceptable substitutes, they might be reconciled with the rest of an adult life.

But when repressed, they return with a vengeance, and visit themselves not on an emotionally seasoned adult psyche, but on the stilted psyche of the arrested child (in the case of the pedophile, who focuses on the prepubescent) or the arrested teenager (the ephebophile — that is the lover of young, but not quite fully grown, men.)

Yet for all the naive babble, how quickly Foley slips from ephebophile into the seedy explicitness of the importuning voyeur once he finds a page who seems ripe for the game. We hear the unmistakable sound of manipulation, of “the perv,” “the dirty old man,” who by tricks and wheedling, tries to snatch what is not mindfully given.

Here is the Congressman (who uses the handle Maf54 — a construct of his initials) instant-messaging with a page that has obviously passed the “what are you doing next summer” phase. (The page’s name is X-ed out in the released pdf transcript, due to his age.)

Maf54 (7:48:00 PM): did you spank it this weekend yourself
Xxxxxxxxx (7:48:04 PM): no … been too tired and too busy
Maf54 (7:48:33 PM): wow… i am never to busy haha
Xxxxxxxxx (7:48:51 PM): haha
Maf54 (7:50:02 PM): or tired..helps me sleep
Xxxxxxxxx (7:50:15 PM): thats true havent been having a problem with sleep though .. i just walk in the door and collapse well at least this weekend
Maf54 (7:50:56 PM): i am sure
Xxxxxxxxx (7:50:57 PM): i dont do it very often normally though
Maf54 (7:51:11 PM): why not … at your age seems like it would be daily
Xxxxxxxxx (7:51:57 PM): not me … im not a horn dog … maybe 2 or 3 times a week
Maf54 (7:52:20 PM): thats a good number … in the shower
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:36 PM): actually usually i dont do it in the shower … just cause i shower in the morning … and quickly
Maf54 (7:52:50 PM): in the bed
Xxxxxxxxx (7:52:59 PM): i get up at 530 and am outta the house by 610 … eh ya
Maf54 (7:53:24 PM): on your back
Xxxxxxxxx (7:53:30 PM): no face down
Maf54 (7:53:32 PM): love details
Xxxxxxxxx (7:53:34 PM): lol … i see that … lol
Maf54 (7:53:39 PM): really … do you really do it face down
Xxxxxxxxx (7:54:03 PM): ya
Maf54 (7:54:13 PM): kneeling
Xxxxxxxxx (7:54:31 PM): well i dont use my hand…i use the bed itself
Maf54 (7:54:31 PM): where do you unload it
Xxxxxxxxx (7:54:36 PM): towel
Maf54 (7:54:43 PM): really … completely naked?
Xxxxxxxxx (7:55:12 PM): well ya
Maf54 (7:55:21 PM): very nice
Xxxxxxxxx (7:55:24 PM): lol
Maf54 (7:55:51 PM): cute butt bouncing in the air
Xxxxxxxxx (7:56:00 PM): haha … well ive never watched myslef but ya i guess
Maf54 (7:56:18 PM): i am sure not … hmmm … great visual … i may try that
Xxxxxxxxx (7:56:43 PM): it works
Maf54 (7:56:51 PM): hmm … sound inetersting … i always use lotion and the hand but who knows
Xxxxxxxxx (7:57:24 PM): i dont use lotion…takes too much time to clean up … with a towel you can just wipe off …. and go
Maf54 (7:57:38 PM): lol … where do you throw the towel
Xxxxxxxxx (7:57:48 PM): but you cant work it too hard or its not good … in the laundry
Maf54 (7:58:16 PM): just kinda slow rubbing
Xxxxxxxxx (7:58:23 PM): ya … or youll rub yourslef raw
Maf54 (7:58:37 PM): well I have aa totally stiff wood now
Xxxxxxxxx (7:58:40 PM): cause the towell isnt very soft
Maf54 (7:58:44 PM): i bet..taht would hurt
Xxxxxxxxx (7:58:50 PM): but you cn find something softer than a towell i guess
Maf54 (7:58:59 PM): but it must feel great spirting on the towel
Xxxxxxxxx (7:59:06 PM): ya
Maf54 (7:59:29 PM): wow … is your little guy limp…or growing
Xxxxxxxxx (7:59:54 PM): eh growing
Maf54 (8:00:00 PM): hmm … you got a stiff one now

There is something profoundly “creepy” (to use the word of a page on the receiving end of a much milder Foley email), something surreally Revival Tent about using the word “spiriting” to mean coming. Later on in the IM session, Foley confides that he would like to slip the boy’s shorts off and grab “the one eyed snake.” Again the language is surreal. It has become deadeningly antique, Victorian — the classic age of buttoned-up pre-Freudian prudery. But the homosexual closet is rife with such dusty hauntings, for it is an avenging Fury, this Return of the Repressed, that erupts from the deep past and swallows up lives and careers in plain sight of all:

Let us simply recall the rich political spectacles of the last decade. Homophobic homosexuals self-destructing in public is by now a commonplace of the Republican Party. And that party has only itself to blame.

To secure the votes of its lowest common denominator — an angry, ill-educated bottom class easily blinded by religiosity and patriotic slogans — the party of Lincoln has thrown its weight behind anti-gay declarations and discriminatory amendments, as it once — only recently — backed covert racism and anti-black measures comprising what was known as “The Southern Strategy ” — a strategy to put the “solid South” solidly in the Republican column.

Foley was one of the gay men who went along with the party’s new and dark gay agenda. He voted in lockstep with other Republicans to pass the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act and defeat an amendment, sponsored by Barney Frank, that would have softened language to exclude civil unions. A check of Mark Foley’s voting record shows that he supported the interests of the Christian Coalition a full 84 percent of the time

Yet the Florida Congressman’s sex life was an open secret among his Republican colleagues and common knowledge in the rich, tolerant Palm Beach district he represented. It was only when he imagined he might run for the Senate that he got the rude awakening so long in waiting for him.

“I will not answer those sorts of questions,” Foley huffed when he declared for the Senate, but it was exactly those sorts of questions that inflamed the hard-right locals living in the panhandle of the state and down its hardscrabble Gulf coast. It was those sorts of questions that Foley’s voting record had helped light.

Florida, for all the jet-setting swank of Miami, was still a place where Sunday mornings brought forth 16 different evangelical broadcasts, and billboard signs regularly instructed homosexuals about hellfire. It was one thing for a perky “confirmed bachelor” to win his well-heeled Palm Beach district, quite another to win the entire State. Foley’s quick exit from the race was classic. He wanted, he said, to “spend more time with my family” — in this case, a father who had been diagnosed some years earlier with a somewhat benign form of prostate cancer.

In a misguided attempt to establish his bona fides with social conservatives, he returned to the House of Representatives to co-chair the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, making blustering, self-righteous statements before the TV cameras like “We track library books better than we do sexual predators.” He crusaded against internet porn sites, like our own (”nothing more than a fix for pedophiles.”) And all the while, the pious Congressman was emailing underage pages with requests like “get a ruler and measure it for me.”

It was, in short, a life deep-fried in homophobic hypocrisies, a life armed to its very teeth against its inner world. A scandal waiting to happen.

And so it did. The Repressed returned right on time — that is, last Friday. And again the exit was a classic. Foley checked into rehab. He had discovered suddenly he was “an alcoholic” with “behavior problems.” It might have been better had he discovered he was a homosexual with boy problems.

The fall of Foley, while yawningly predictable, is instructive nevertheless. It would be simplistic to insist that if Foley had led an openly gay life, he would not have pursued underaged men. Sex with not-yet-legal youths, as much as with children, is a self-propelled taste, independent of hetero or homo inclinations. It is not, after all, just homosexuals who shut down in their early development and lock into place.

The world is too full of examples to the contrary, most famously in the novel Lolita, which for all it satiric brio, takes pains to convey the smallness of such a life, the obsessive dog chasing its tale-ness of such a life, with an accuracy that is backed up by the therapeutic literature. (Though, in Humbert Humbert’s case, his affair with Lolita has the unlikely outcome of seeming to cure him, for he offers to take Lolita back when she is not only a grown women, but doubly a grown woman — she is pregnant.)

Sexual obsession, then, is not eliminated by long walks in the woods or rap sessions with the vile Dr. Phil. Yet we mustn’t give Foley too much of a pass. He still lives in the same world we do. Had he found the nerve to lead an open life, he might have worked out a legal, socially-consistent compromise that would not have thrown his career off the rails. He might even have chosen a mature relationship, on equal footing, and not have rolled into his fifties obsessing over green, unripened manhood. With a smidgen of self-understanding this life could have taken a positive turn, despite the homophobic barbarities that he and the rest of us grew up negotiating.

In fact the volume around this story, the swift conflation of pedophilia with the post-pubescent teenagers Foley actually desired, the hysteric cries of “harm” done to the “children” — are themselves informed with a pervasive homophobic barbarity. As the facts stand at this moment, there is no evidence — and no one is claiming — that Mark Foley ever had sex with any of the pages, much less “harmed” them.

It is rather the mere whiff of homosexuality, the idea of a homosexual enticing a young male into homosexual sex acts that has set off the loudest alarm bells. If Foley’s IM message is any judge, it appears he was soliciting the giving of a handjob. This absolutely pales beside the popular heterosexual misconception that what gay men really want is to anally penetrate their partners. If all gay men were straight men, this might fly. The truth more often lies elsewhere, as it is manhood in its stompy assertiveness, not a faked female languor, that more commonly turns gay men on.

We must ratchet down the rhetoric if we wish to find common ground with Foley’s critics. The law assumes — and here we think the law has got it right — that in any case of sex with minors, the adult is always the predator. Minors, by definition, can not give their consent, even when — as in the case of the fictional Lolita — they initiate the climactic act themselves.

The Republicans had been promising an “October surprise” — the sort of late breaking stunt right before an election geared to turn the vote around. They just didn’t know that it would be Mark Foley, exploding in their face. The cable shows have latched on to the word “hemorrhaging” to describe what is happening to the Republican majority in Congress.

And again, we see the revenge of the Repressed in action. The Republican base, which was abetted in their anti-gay bigotry by the party dignitaries, is now demanding the heads of those same dignitaries — not only Foley, who in any case immediately resigned, but the Speaker of the House for an alleged cover up of the case.

It is suspected that when the young page first complained about the emails back in February to the House Rep he worked for, the Republican leadership hushed him up. They were more interested in getting their majority re-elected than jeopardizing one of their members by cleaning house.

Like Foley themselves, the House leadership regularly makes pious professions about “the family” and “the children.” And like Foley, it has proved to be just so much bluster. Nothing more than coded attacks on gay people, the favorite whipping boy of a bigoted Christian base.

As the lady once said, it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. Payback — the return of the repressed — is always a bitch.