By Gary Leupp
The Jeff Gannon Affair drew our attention to the fact that a male
prostitute
can sleep over at the White House on multiple occasions. The Tom
Foley
Affair alerted us to the phenomenon of conservative Republican
lawmakers'
passion for teenage pageboys. 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. And now, the Larry Craig Scandal draws our
attention to
the phenomenon of conservative Republican lawmakers firmly opposed to
gay
rights getting off on impersonal anonymous homo-sex in men's room
toilet
stalls.
It looks like two more conservative "family values" Republican
senators may
be "outed" soon, by Mike Rogers, the same blogger who originally
fingered
Craig. The gay activist claims that South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham
is
gay. More interestingly, he claims that, "Republican Senate Minority
Leader
Mitch McConnell's quick expulsion from the Army--for fondling a
private's
privates--is finally being discussed in Kentucky." 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 30
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, among other things, I tend to approach
these
issues in a dispassionate, 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 sits, on the tearoom toilet seat, tapping
his foot
as he solicits gay sex. It's just too amusing. But also sort of sad.
_______
About author Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct
Professor of
Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works
on
Japanese history. He can be reached at: [1].
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