Thoughts on Larry Craig

At this very moment, I am listening to a dramatic reading done by Paul Hipp of the police report detailing Republican Senator Larry Craig's advances to an undercover cop at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. I was able to see Craig's blue eyes as he looked into my stall... The tap of the foot, the wedding ring appearing, with the left hand, under the stall edge, the slow dance of one foot answered by another foot tapping on the tiles. It's almost poetic, the way he cries out 'No!' as the police identification is slipped under the partition in place of a hard cock.

It seems like these days everything you've ever wanted to know about clandestine, closeted homosexual sex can be learned by reading Roll Call. First you had Florida Republican Bob Allen mounting a gay black panic defense for why he offered an undercover cop $20 to blow him in a Titusville, Florida public toilet. Claiming that he was intimidated by the sheer number of big, beefy black guys hanging around the place, he did what any of us would do to save ourselves: offer to suck dick in exchange for safe passage.

A few weeks later came Glen Murphy, Jr., chairman of the Clark County Republican Party in Indiana and newly-elected head of the Young Republican National Federation, who resigned his political posts following allegations he had performed oral sex on a sleeping man. It wasn't the first time (the pdf of the police report is basically wank material).

Now we have Republican Larry Craig, who would like us to believe his foot tapping, eye contact, travel bag placement, and hand sweeps under the partition are the result of a wide stance on the shitter and not a display of intimate knowledge of both the means of finding where men have sex with men anonymously but also how to make the right signals.

What I find astonishing about this spate of closeted, hypocritical, and sad individuals, all of them members of a political party that makes political hay by throwing gays into the combine season after season, is how the right has hung these acts on the neck of the liberal gay community, whose apparent legacy of loose morals and degenerate sex is to blame. For despite Craig's status as a devout Republican from a blood-red state, (former) senate liason to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, and advocate of anti-gay legislation, as soon as he gets caught with his dick in his hand in a men's room, he instantly transmogrifies into a gay man.

Who cruises in public anymore?

It seems like a throw-back to an earlier time for the gay community, when double-lives were de rigeur and the lives of gay men, even those struggling for a cohesive self (one which we would come to call 'out'), could be marked by pathology. The gay community would like you to believe that bathroom sex between men today is an embarrassing remnant of that closeted age. Indeed, it served a real community-building purpose decades ago in some of America's major cities--the man you fooled around with in the public loo or the public park could then become a friend, an ally, a link to a community.

'Conservative' gay spokespeople, such as Andrew Sullivan, would have you believe that public sex, like other forms of homosexual sex that do not, in some way, mirror a heterosexual practice to which all of us gays should aspire, is no longer necessary now that a critical mass of a queer community has formed in most US cities. One way of thinking sees the unfortunate legacy of cruising for sex in public as a way point on the way to a maturing gay individual--and hence gay community--that instead of aspiring to fucking everything in sight aspires to monogamous gay marriage, house in the suburbs, etc.

The end of gay culture

Check out this astonishing blog post on Andrew Sullivan's blog by Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic. First, the blog post quotes, favorably, from a reader's email:

The current political wars are a re-alignment. It used to be gay vs straight. But now it's the old gay culture against the new gay culture. Larry Craig cruises for sex in bathrooms, he's part of the old gay culture. His lifestyle is threated by gay marriage: more guys sitting at the boarding gate with their husbands means fewer in the airport washroom. His lifestyle is threated by gays in the military: more sailors with boyfriends on shore means fewer available underneath the dock. Craig, West, and Haggard are the death throes of the old gay culture, desperately longing for the good old days.

Could you over simplify the Larry Craig case anymore? Old gay culture versus new gay culture? Larry Craig votes against gay marriage because as long as gays can't marry there will be more looking for sex in airport bathrooms? Come on! Kirchick continues by writing:

In other words, say goodbye to anonymous cruising and say hello to more weddings. I think there's a limit to this analysis --as men will always be men-- but the the normalization and stabilization of gay life (epitomized by gay marriage) over the past 30 years has only helped gay male culture mature.

Indeed, this scandal could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. The same day that Andrew--who has spent much of his intellectual life advocating for gay marriage, when many in the gay rights movement were trumpeting separatism, the necessity of being "queer," and other such indulgences--gets married, a United States Senator --who has been a loyal foot soldier in the movement to deny gays (perhaps, like himself) civil rights-- is revealed to have allegedly sought out sex with an anonymous man in an airport restroom. Perhaps there is no greater comparison between the stability of being comfortable with who you are and the self-denial and self-hatred of the closet. It's not just the "old" gay culture of anonymous sexual encounters vs. the "new" gay culture of monogamy; it's self-loathing vs. self-affirmation.

This neat little paragraph, so succinct in its erasing of history and obfuscation of what gay culture--both conservative and queer--is actually like today, would choose your 'side' for you. You can be with Larry Craig, a self-loathing gay man. Not just self-loathing because of his double life and the damage he's willfully done to gay families and individuals as a US Senator, but self-loathing simply because he seeks out anonymous sex. On the side of Larry Craig is anyone who's felt confined by the limiting political agenda of gay marriage, those of us who have advocated for broader critiques of heterosexuality and marriage. Those of us who have been attracted to notions of a broader, queer identity, an identity and political movement that has opened up spaces for transgender people, etc., are separatists, concerned with petty indulgences and pleasures of the moment. It's no longer enough to come out of the closet -- you have to come out of the bathroom stall, as well.

Old gay culture: anonymous sexual encounters. New gay culture: monogamy. Were there no committed gay couples before AIDS? And are all these marrying gays locked in coupledom today monogamous? Thankfully, gay culture today, even the gay culture of committed couples, resembles nothing like the version promulgated by Jaimie Kirchick and Andrew Sullivan. Rather than simply ape the quiet desperation of many heterosexual marriages, most gay 'marriages' I know of are based on trust, communication, and realistic evaluations of the needs and desires of humans. So, many of the gay couples I know of allow room for sex outside of the relationship. These arrangements take on many forms, and for the most part are mutually agreed upon and increase, rather than decrease, the overall happiness of both people.

And not all of us in the gay community--the "New Gays," if you will--aspire to monogamy and marriage. The fact of the matter is, gay men today, in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties and beyond still go through periods where their focus is on anonymous or semi-anonymous sex. Maybe it's for a few years in their early twenties, when they're free from living at home, perhaps finding themselves in a big city for the first time. Or maybe it's in their thirties, fresh out of a long-term relationship, looking for a few months of freedom before re-entering the dating scene. Whatever. The practical reality is that bathroom sex, and airport sex, and park sex, is risky. There are not only sexy undercover cops but gay bashers to contend with. And poison ivy sometimes. Instead, these cultures have been folded into the gay community -- sex partners are met at bars, or on internet hookup sites, or via Craigslist.

The problem for people like Larry Craig is that to access these sites you have to identify, at least at some superficial level, with gay culture itself. By walking into a gay bar in Dupont Circle you must, at some base level, identify with being gay. And that's what it appears was so hard for Larry Craig to do, and thus his desires could only find an outlet in spaces that were homosocial, rather than homosexual.

On the topic of outing...

Glen Greenwald had a great blog in Slate yesterday on the hypocritical reactions in the right-wing blogosphere regarding Larry Craig's sexuality, then and now. Read the whole thing yourself, but the point of the piece is that last October, weeks before the election, Mike Rogers broke the news of Larry Craig's double life. At the time, it was dismissed as a political stunt and it sickened those on the right who predicted a backlash for this kind of invasive, personal muckracking.

A few months later and those same bloggers are calling for his head.

I'd like to think my own position on the matter doesn't change as much when it comes to the outing of public officials and public figures. If you are an elected official who drafts and supports legislation that directly affects the personal lives of gay and lesbian people, either by limiting rights, denying cohesive families, or sanctioning discrimination or by contributing to an overall culture in which gays are demonized, then you deserve to have your own personal life, if not scrutinized, then at least publicized, when it is discovered that you aren't practicing what you preach for the rest of us. Larry Craig is a sad, pathetic individual. But he could have chosen to align himself with other political goals, other political groups. He could have tried to make a political career another way. In the end, he--and by extension the Republican Party--gets what he deserves.

Disgust

Check out this amazing exchange between
conservative pundits Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough. Tucker Carlson explains how he's been 'bothered' before in a public toilet--and what he did about it.

ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.

CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and -- and --

ABRAMS: And did what?

CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

[laughter]

CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I'm the least anti-gay right-winger you'll ever meet --

[laughter]

CARLSON: -- but I do think doing this in men's rooms appears to be common. It's totally wrong, and they should knock it off. I mean that. I think it's -- I can't bring my son to the men's room at the park where he plays soccer because of all these creepy guys hanging around in there. I actually think it's a problem. I'm sorry.

Earlier in the exchange, Joe Scarborough asks around if anyone's been 'bothered,' in a bathroom, proudly proclaiming that he hasn't. And by that of course he means that no one could possibly mistake him for being gay. The subtext--and I'm totally, unabashedly reading my own concerns into this transcript--is that Tucker Carlson realizes that in admitting to being 'bothered' in a restroom, he's admitting to the opposite--that he has in fact been mistaken for a gay guy cruising for sex in the bathroom. Perhaps it was the foppish hair or dandy bowtie? In any case, he has to end his narrative by admitting that he can't take his son into the bathroom because of all the creepy guys there. Well, Larry Craig has three children.

This is ridiculous. Have you ever been 'bothered' in a public restroom? Aside from someone standing at the urinal for a long time, way longer than it takes to drain the main vein, the only way you are going to get bothered in a restroom is by doing something to bring it on. Guys don't just walk around waving the things around in the air like propellers.

And Carlson's admission that after being 'bothered' he went back with a friend and "grabbed the guy by the -- you know...[the crotch?]" and slammed his head into a wall before the police arrived, is both meant to be an admission of his manly, base instincts, and acceptable. It's also incredibly revealing.

Hypothetically, if you 'bothered' by a guy in a bathroom, you could react in a few different ways, depending on your disposition. You could flip out and beat him up or assault him, you could laugh in his face, you could get down on your knees, you could embarrass him, you could simply walk away, shocked. Your reaction is based entirely on internal factors. My own theory is that the feeling of disgust is intimately linked to familiarity. We're disgusted by things that strike a chord of familiarity with us on the inside. Larry Craig and Tucker Carlson are motivated by disgust--Larry Craig is motivated to support family values and legislation that damages gay people. Tucker Carlson is motived by disgust to smash a guy's head into a wall. My theory is that, at some level, these people are lashing out externally at representations of something they feel very deeply inside of them. I've just come to believe that Republicans like Larry Craig and Bob Allen -- and others who push an anti-gay agenda are not the stalwart defenders of traditional family values but instead reacting to their own fragmented, insecure, messy inner lives. They hate gays because in them they recognize parts of themselves that they hate.

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Posted by jason at August 30, 2007 4:17 PM