The Ted Haggard Scandal showed us that conservative Republican preachers who sermonize against gay rights can smolder with lust for man-to-man action.
The arrest of Republican Florida State Rep. Bob Allen at a park in Central Florida, showed us that the coauthor of a recent public lewdness bill can lewdly solicit sex from an undercover male cop.
He notes that McConnell, discharged after just
10 days in the Army in 1967, “has consistently prevented anyone from
seeing his military discharge papers” but a Freedom of Information suit
may bring them to light. (After the revelation of Craig’s arrest and
confession, McConnell cosigned a statement with other top Republican
legislators stating, “This is a serious matter” and indicating he is
examining “other aspects of the case to determine if additional action
is required.”)
Schadenfreude aside, I almost feel badly for
the rank and file homophobic Christian rightists who have to read about
these scandalous goings-on. Perusing some blogs I encounter a couple of
their confused, angry reactions: (1) it’s the Log Cabin Republicans’
fault, (2) the Democrats are to blame for promoting the idea that such
behavior is “normal.” (I haven’t found anyone accusing the cop of a
politically-motivated set-up.)
The widespread occurrence of
such depravity in their own ranks must produce some frustration among
the ultras. These men they trust as sincere homophobes, taking their
cue from Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26-27, turn out to be such
hypocrites. Of course if the sinner repents, and seeks treatment for
his sickness, the Christian can forgive. But this cascade of scandals
has got to produce some doubts about the whole antigay campaign central
to the religious right’s political program. The rigid un-nuanced minds
of these people crave authority figures, and when the latter so
suddenly and deeply disappoint, there has to be some wavering of faith.
But that’s a good thing.
Forgive my failure to express moral
outrage about these scandals. I am among other things an historian of
sexuality and attempt to address sexual issues dispassionately. I’m not
going to dwell on the Idaho senator’s two-facedness—everybody else is
doing that anyway—or rejoice in his embarrassing situation, which if he
weren’t such a fraud would strike me as rather tragic. After all, he
was just a guy in an airport restroom, signaling the guy in the next
stall that he had some urgent needs which a consenting partner might be
able to satisfy. For his trouble he got busted by a cop, apparently
well versed in gay subculture protocols, sitting there on a toilet with
his pants up for God knows how long (and compensated by how many
taxpayer dollars) for the express purpose of arresting men for tapping
their feet, and intruding those feet or their hands into the
neighboring space expecting a positive response. Sgt. Dave Karsnia was
there to crack down on this sort of behavior on the grounds that it
infringed the typical toilet-user’s privacy. That strikes me as
reasonable enough, although I’d think a simple, “get your foot out of
my stall, dude,” would have immediately aborted the overture.
I
wonder how many of these police missions are triggered by complaints by
men never threatened or meaningfully harassed during their stall-time
but merely disgusted by the realization that there are men in this
world so sick as to play footsie on the toilet, soliciting gay sex, and
inclined to visit the wrath of God on their degenerate selves by doing
so. I don’t mean to minimize the sense of privacy invasion felt by
those experiencing unwanted stall intrusions, but I can see homophobia
as a factor fueling appeals for police action.
The point of
the police action in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
last June, which resulted in Craig’s arrest, was to discourage men with
Craig’s particular fetish by arresting a bunch of them. Every so often
police departments, responding to complaints from public restroom
patrons, undertake these clean-up missions. One Canadian study
(published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice)
indicates that in one day in one restroom around 1990, police charged
17 men. The owner of a facility in another case requested police
action, and in one day 3
0 men were warned.
These figures
suggest that that the facilities that had come to serve as reliable
centers for sexual contact and were visited largely for that purpose.
This appears to be a widespread phenomenon.
Yes, I confess
I’ve done some research on this issue over the last 24 hours. As an
historian of sexuality, I tend to approach these issues in academic
fashion. So I checked out Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex
in Public Places, written under the direction of Harvard sociologist
Lee Rainwater, published in 1970 and recipient of the C. Wright Mills
Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. “Tearoom trade”
refers to homosexual activity (almost always oral) in public men’s
rooms, and Humphreys examines it in clinical detail. His most
interesting finding was that over half of the men involved in this
activity were married (to women) and carefully separated their private
and social selves, donning “the breastplate of righteousness” in public
as conservative “moral crusaders” (p. 131f).
They expressed no
anti-police sentiment, but encouraged more vice squad activity,
suggesting that “deviant behavior may be plagued by a sort of moral
arms race, in which the deviant is caught in the cycle of establishing
new strategic defenses to protect himself from the fallout of his own
defensive weapons. It is not necessary to adapt a psychoanalytic
viewpoint in order to discern the self-hatred behind such a punishment
process” (p. 141). This is not to say that their private, men’s room
self is at war with their social, official self; it can be flushed away
and forgotten as they leave their stalls. But the latter self that
takes over at that point wants to appear cleaner than the norm and to
sneer with particular distain at all moral defilement.
One
thinks of Mark Foley coauthoring legislation criminalizing the sharing
of obscenity over the internet with minors. Or Bob Allen authoring a
statute against public lewdness. There’s a specific pathology here.
Craig’s record on gay rights has been among the most conservative in
the Senate. In 2005 the American Conservative Union gave his voting
record a score of 96 out of 100. Outwardly a pious Methodist, a member
of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association since 1983,
he’s the picture of far-right respectability. But there he sits, on the
tearoom toilet seat, tapping his foot as he solicits gay sex. It’s just
too amusing. But also sort of sad.
Writings 
The Jeff Gannon Affair drew our attention to the fact that a male prostitute can sleep over at the White House on multiple occasions. 
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