Society’s new sexual microcosm: the Men’s Room.
Gay Republican outings are the gift that just keeps on giving for us.
Not only do we get to witness years of pitiful self-loathing come crashing down upon a debased hypocrite, but we experience heterosexuals getting seriously deep as they ponder:
“Why, oh why!?” and “How could this have happened !?”
Their soul-searching always results in them wanting to peer into the murky depths of gay culture for the answer. If they really wanted to know, they’d look inward for the root cause.
Enter foxy, cerebral sex columnist Dan Savage to hold up a mirror to all the voyeuristic moralizing and lay bare what’s really driving Hetero Pillars of the Community into the stalls and headlines.
Larry Craig, like every other Right Wing closet case who’s been unearthed in the past seven years, has a problem, and no, it’s not just that he’s gay.
In the words of beleaguered outsider Dawn Weiner from Welcome To The Dollhouse: “Just because you’re a faggot doesn’t mean you’re an asshole.”
The problem is that Craig really believes he isn’t gay.
It takes years of denial, clandestine sexual encounters, go-through-the-motions marriages, and pathetic Bible thumping to get to that point. Gay is just the icing on top of a bitter cake made of delusion, dread, and sweet, sweet shame. Any self-respecting gay guy isn’t going to be caught dead doing it in a bathroom, much less in Minneapolis with this loser.
This is no doubt a stunner for CNN’s Rick Sanchez, whose main claim to fame is getting tasered into a stupor, submerged in a sinking car, abandoned at sea, and waterboarded in the name of good story. You’d think Sanchez could’ve at least gone undercover as a Family Values Conservative prowling for some dirty, sinful action to truly grasp the issue.
Better to call in an expert. “Get me a gay for this segment! Stat!”
Leave it to Dan Savage to bring some dignity, perspective, and actual acumen to the proceedings. If Sanchez was hoping for inane sex chatter and contrived outrageousness from Savage, he had another thing coming.
Enjoy as Savage blows Sanchez’s mind right out of the gate when asked about the far-reaching effects of public sex in the gay community:
“It’s not a problem in the lives of most openly gay men,” Savage explains.
“Invariably when there’s a bust in a public restroom where there’s this type of lewd activity going on, reporters are shocked to discover that the men who have been arrested are heterosexually-identified, straight-identified married men … and priests. Very rarely do you hear about openly gay men being busted … it’s a release mechanism for guys who are closeted.”
Sanchez’s brilliant reply: “So whose fault is it that they’re closeted?” — later querying: “Couldn’t you just say these guys — the ones who are actually found guilty of something like this — are just plain wrong and it has nothing to do with the culture forcing them do these things?”
You could say that if you’re utterly out of touch and looking for a trite, convenient closure to a complex and socially-ingrained issue. Credit goes to Savage for being able to resist his eyes involuntarily rolling back into his head as he reveals to numskull Rick that closeted gays have always existed and that hetero culture is actually responsible for sowing their seeds of discontent:
Savage continues: “Gays and lesbians don’t construct a culture that encourages people to remain closeted all their lives. For fifteen hundred years you couldn’t live as an openly gay person and heterosexuality was compulsory. People had heterosexual lives — gay people did — and had gay sex in places where the culture said ‘OK, there and nowhere else’: bath houses, bathrooms, public parks. And that cultural compact has now shifted where you can live an openly gay life. There’s less tolerance for this kind of activity even amongst gays and lesbians. There’s nothing gay about what he was doing — he was doing something pathetic and desperate.”
There’s the rub, Mr. Sanchez. Craig’s character flaws don’t represent the gay body politic at large and ultimately aren’t a huge source of concern for us. We get that you don’t just accidentally cruise someone — you really have to seek it out. Self-acceptance is the antidote to all the lies. The problem sits at the doorstep of tidy, brightly-lit suburbia and the blandly virtuous Heartland.
The cynosure of Savage’s argument is evolution of social roles; stigmas weaken and fall by the wayside as the world progresses. Or at least they do in a healthy society. Gays don’t often even have the luxury of remaining complacent because we move on the outer wings, ever-adapting when doors close upon us.
That’s the beauty of not having your every move dictated by an ancient book written by long-dead scribes — you’re free to live in the moment, rather than cling to the past. It’s the fear of change, the terror of sex, and the justification of irrational superstitions that create the mess that is Larry Craig over a lifetime. We don’t banish women from the home when they menstruate in 2007. We don’t stone witches either. There are social shifts that the all-purpose Bible couldn’t anticipate, much less comprehend.
The media itself is just as guilty of promoting hysteria.
Savage notes how footage of cherubic children playing in public parks will turn up onscreen when an incident like Craig’s arrest is reported in order to ratchet up the moral outrage.
“Your children are in peril! Won’t someone please think of the children?!”
How often are images of toddlers intercut with Spring Break shenanigans? Why are publicly promiscuous heterosexuals never equated with child molesters?
Watch as Sanchez mitigates for Bob “I paid him twenty bucks to blow him because he was black and he scared me” Allen and try not to laugh.
None of these men are “tempted” into anything; their vice comes from within, not without. The tyrannical values they preach breed the dirt they track in from the johns to their own living rooms.
Savage’s words hit home: the Right has created the very monsters it despises — Dorian Grays whose private portraits lie wretched and hidden until they blanch in the glare of camera bulbs and mug shots — ultimately refusing to even take any responsibility for them once they’re exposed. There are no attacks upon their way of life.
The creatures already walk among them.
Applause to Savage. I note Mr. Sanchez’s thin mask of his own religious bias is crooked and frequently overlooked in his bombast.
Police posing as agent-provocateurs; Adroit reporters amd Union leaders at Quebec’s Montebello summit last month outed three police officers disguised as rioters and inciting riots; this will probably be dismissed as ’shennigans’
I am dismayed at what occurs in the mind and the soul of these provacteurs ensnaring their prey. How do they justify the ruinous consequences they precipitated when the wrappings of a police uniform eventually wear off, and they do.
Bloated and self-rightous identities gravitate into these careers, I suppose, finding guidance and meaning in the two thousand year old scribblings of desert nomads.
Also Bravo to Mark Gerogos’ rational arguements on CNN/Larry King last week.
Guilty or not, it’s definitely entrapment. There were no cameras so where is the proof? How many other guys have been arrested in that notorious men’s room? Craig’s BIG mistake was admitting he was soliciting same sex & then denying it. How could anyone so anti-gay admit to being such a “dirty deed doer” thinking that would make it go away? And, who cares if he’s gay or not? Alot of straight guys enjoy an expert blow from another male.
Man, you mean all those hot stories about gay sex in the parks, public toilets, and bathhouses were written by closeted gay married men? That only closeted gays participate in such overt sexual activity? You mean openly gay men no longer participate in this type of activity because society is now open to them? I must educate my openly gay friend that he shouldn’t suck other men off in public bathrooms or in the dunes on the nude beach. Because … openly Gay men just don’t do that anymore. Where do people come up with this tripe and become the all knowing experts? People, no matter how clean a public bathroom is; it’s still filthy! Just think, sometime in the future when the G-Force outs all the closeted Gays, Glory Holes will become museum pieces.
Believe it or not, many of us in the post-AIDS generation aren’t turned on by anonymous public sex and it isn’t some essential part of our beings we feel the need to hold onto in order to maintain our “edge”. I don’t want to be picked up in a restroom or a Times Square video store. It doesn’t turn me on. I’m not at all sorry that may someday fall totally out of favor.
Savage is right. Times have changed and we need to change with them. I’m sure that the 70s were a wonderful age of free expression, but we just don’t have the option of living our lives that way anymore. In some ways the younger generation is having to deal with the fallout of the one that came before it. Everything comes with a price tag. There is no absolute freedom without consequences, even for us. Yeah, I could probably nail four or five guys a week who couldn’t pick me out of line up a few hours later.
I’d rather just have one guy with substance and some self-respect like me instead. Serve me up a big bowl of that tripe if means I don’t get used up and tossed aside.
I’m somewhere in the ‘middle’ on this
It all depends on how I’m situated in my life.
If I’m looking to date, I’m not trawling public restrooms. If I’m horny and want that quick hit of relief that a blowjob through a gloryhole (given or received or both) delivers, then, man I’m there.
What’s great about being a guy is how our equipment is designed — it’s easily maneuvered and easily exposed (and retracted) for the kind of quick sex that sex in public places allows. Or not.
I’ve been in a committed relationship now for five years and I don’t do the backroom or bookstore or restroom thing anymore and yet I don’t condemn those who do either.
It’s not so much what generation one is from, but how a person is situated, what their wants and needs are for relating that is the deciding factor.
“Next time you hear some particularly moralizing speech, set your watch. You won’t have to wait long before the man who made it is found, crouched awkwardly yet ecstatically while the cistern drips and the roar of the flush maddens him like wine.”
Don’t miss Christopher Hitchens take on Bathroom Sex.
nightcharm rules…thanks guys for the smartest queer commentary going. the Hitchen’s quote above is pure bliss.
There’s yet another level to the apparent cluelessness playing out on the TV screens about the whole Craig thing. Let’s just say I have reason to know from personal experience, many of the commentators, or “talent” as they are called at the networks, are very savvy and know much better than they let on on screen. But their job is to look good and play their adopted persona (thus, their talent) and mouth the words that are being fed into their earpieces or put on the teleprompter by the news directors, VPs and rules & practices people who are the true arbiters of what makes it to your TV.
As a news director once said to me, “X [very famous person] doesn’t say a word I don’t tell him to.”
was abroad where media (exception: UK) don’t make a fuss about this crap. What is so pecularly “american” here and even Savage over-looked in his rush-through by CNN’s Sanchez is the entrapment issue. Law-”enforcement” spend hours, days, spying on websites to learn where next they may bust - and disgrace, and turn citizens into sex-offenders, discredit the gay-rights movement; they even recruit their “cutest” to act as decoys. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! reported today the same men’s room at MSP had yielded numerous arrests by undercover cops last month….(14…or 40?….couldn’t hear….we assume police are psychotic anyway - do we need this kind of Orwellian waste in the 21st century?
It’s not the worst crime in my mind, but it is illegal. They can’t put cameras in restrooms, so they have to put the bait out there if they’re gonna make a bust. It’s not like doing a hooker sweep. Are a lot of guys they bust really just first-timers who say “what the hell, why not?” or are they repeat offenders?
Dan Savage is the guy who once declared the AIDS epidemic as being over since the new drugs work so well. Can you trust this fellow? Someone who by such spotlight-mongering declarations unwittingly sends hundreds of young uneducated gay men off to engage in unsafe sex and thus further the AIDS epidemic. Savage is an attention-hungry dude. He’s written some pretty moralistic & conservative columns despite always trying for the shock value. Be careful about taking his words at face value.
Haven’t American police officers got other problems to tend to than blowjobs in public restrooms? Every time I go to a city in the US, I’m being warned about the quarters I should never go to because of security problems and high crime rates. I guess, “lewd conduct” in restrooms is really a minor problem, especially as the guys tend to be rather cautious, as they do not want to implicate somebody who’s not interested in gay sex.
I’m an open gay man living in a (sexually open) committed relationship, and in Germany even the religious right doesn’t care very much about gay sex, it’s become a non issue - the city of Hamburg has a conservative mayor from the Christian Democratic Party who is gay, some years ago, the leader of the Liberal Party chose the 50th birthday of Conservative Leader Angela Merkel (now she’s the first female chancelor of Germany) as an appropriate occasion in order to present his new boyfriend to the press, and Merkel felicitated him, got photographed with the two guys and sends official greetings from the office of the chancelor when the annual Gay Pride Parade is celebrated in Berlin.
But I have to say that sometimes bathroom sex or sex in public parks still has its charms for me - it’s completely different from sex in a relationship. I don’t see myself as “sick” or “hypocritical”, I’m just a gay man with strong sexual urges. In a bathroom I even met a very nice bisexual guy with a huge cock (he’s a judge and a father of three) whom I have very tender sex with from time to time, but now at my place, not at the bathroom. He keeps his gay activities secret from his family and I would never tell anybody about him. He’s not anti-gay, and what he tells his wife is his affair, not mine.
Of course, it’s always a pleasure to have conservative hypocrites outed, like the supposedly heterosexual Ted Haggard fooling around with his drug dealer, but normally sex should be a private affair even if it takes place in public places (of course as long as no “innocent bystanders” or children are implicated).
I really like the US, but I’ve got the impression that Americans are hysterical about sex in general and I do not understand why the sex life of politicians bothers them that much. I mean, Bill Clinton got a blowjob in the Oval Office - big deal! In “decadent” Europe nobody cared.
Republicans still make a big fuss about that little sin, whereas they don’t find fault with the current decider-in-chief who got more then 4000 American soldiers and probably a six figure number of Iraqi civilians killed and has only succeeded in strengthening Iran and opening up a new playground for Al-Qaida in the lawless morass he has turned Iraq into.
You know. I was thinking about this last night. I found it interesting that his only argument or point of refutation was “I am not nor have I ever been gay”. I find it funny that he chose that as his defense when being gay wasn’t even the accusation! The accusation had nothing to do with being gay, or doing “gay things”, but acting like a nasty at the airport. I don’t understand what the fuck he was thinking. Just fucking be a politician and LIE!! Completely denying it would have been better than making American leaders look like even worse fools to the world than they already do by making excuses and silly arguments. Please, bitch!!
WOW
I want to join, but I don’t have money!