IGF CultureWatch

Not long ago, the "family values" crowd thought the best way to oppose gay rights was to slander gay people. To them, being gay was synonymous with behavior that was objectionable, anti-social or illegal. Republican politicians insisted that marriage had to be "defended" from gay couples. Paul Cameron, a "psychologist" whose junk science is still a staple of right-wing Web sites, has written that gay people are "sexual bums" who suffer from a "preoccupation with sex" and "seek excessive distraction" through sex, drugs and other risk-taking behaviors.

The political argument that followed from this picture was simple and insidious: Why should these people be allowed to marry one another, or be protected against hate crimes or job discrimination?

But lately, it seems, Republicans and the religious right have stumbled onto something even more deviously effective. Rather than talking about icky behavior, they are modeling icky behavior, and forcing the rest of us to talk about it. Their antics practically guarantee that the media will discuss homosexuality in the same breath as pedophilia, prostitution and anonymous sexual encounters. This is an evil-genius political strategy worthy of Karl Rove.

Consider:

• Sen. Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican with a 100 percent rating from the American Family Association, unwittingly plays footsy with a cop, gets himself arrested, then goes on television to indignantly declare, "I am not gay!" The impression many Americans get: being gay means picking up men in bathrooms.

• Mark Foley, the former Florida Republican congressman, gets caught having racy online chats with teenage males, resigns from Congress, then blames his behavior on a drinking problem and checks into rehab. The message: gay men are pedophiles, and they deal with their messy, embarrassing lives by turning to alcohol. At best, they're to be pitied. At worst, they're creepy criminals.

• Ted Haggard, the evangelical minister disgraced by allegations by a male prostitute about illicit sex and methamphetamine use, undergoes religious "therapy" and is subsequently pronounced "completely heterosexual." The message: being gay is an illness that causes you to do drugs and hang out with hustlers.

The truth is that these behaviors are not about being gay (any more than Sen. David Vitter's patronage of the D.C. Madam was about being straight). If anything, they are about being closeted and repressed - conditions that Republicans and many churches have encouraged by treating homosexuality as a source of shame rather than a normal human variation.

Through their bumbling and hypocrisy, Haggard, Foley and Craig have not only disgraced themselves, they have inflamed old stereotypes - stereotypes that were being rapidly discarded as more and more gay people came out and shared the realities of their respectable, everyday lives with families and friends.

Now it may be that much more difficult for these same gay citizens to have an informed, rational dialogue with their fellow Americans about legitimate political and legal issues. Even if many Americans have shed old ideas and become more comfortable with homosexuality, will the media give equal time to sober debates about equal marriage rights, hate crimes legislation and job discrimination? Unlikely.

The more they're told about boys, bathrooms and prostitutes, the less Americans will learn about the real lives of their gay neighbors and co-workers. That might be a windfall for anti-gay activists and wedge-issue politicians. But it's a civic and moral disaster for the rest of us.

I have to plead a certain naivet� about this business of restroom sex. I have never solicited anyone for sex in a public restroom; nor, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone ever solicited me. Should I be hurt that no one ever did? Aren't I attractive enough? Do I wear the wrong shoes? What am I doing wrong?

My discomfort with restroom sex, I suppose, is not so much moral as aesthetic. Public restrooms just don't seem very appealing places to spend much time hanging around hoping for sexual connections. The ambiance--the chemical and bodily odors, the noises, the bustle of people going in and out--doesn't seem very erotic. Maybe you get used to it. If you have enough sex in that kind of environment maybe you build up a conditioned response of finding it exciting. But I don't think that's a conditioned response I want to acquire.

Soon after I came out, friends took me to gay bars and told me about gay bathhouses. Those always seemed more attractive and convenient places to scout for sexual partners in the absence of a lover. And at bars and bathhouses if you failed to find a suitable partner, you could always socialize, get to know people, make friends, not just sit there idly on a hard bathroom fixture waiting for Mr. Anybody.

I had heard about this foot-tapping business (no one mentioned the playing footsie part) more than 35 years ago, but I guess I thought of it as something left over from the bad old pre-gay liberation days, something that would die out as people became more open about being gay and found more appealing places to meet other gay men.

But that sanguine view ignored a couple of things. 1) A lot of gay men live and work in locations that don't have gay bars or bathhouses. With them I sympathize. 2) And a lot of gay men remain untouched by the message of gay liberation. They are married with families, or in the closet at work, or adhere to an anti-gay religion, or refuse to acknowledge to themselves that they are gay. Some may even buy the religious line that homosexuality is wrong but find they cannot resist their "weakness."

If they get caught in a restroom or highway rest stop incident, they may vociferously deny they are gay, thus implying that hanging around restrooms or rest stops is what gay men typically do. In other words, if their circumstances inhibit self-acceptance and public disclosure, their behavior on the basis of those circumstances, if revealed, simply supports the religious right's propaganda that "the gay lifestyle" is lonely, seedy, and risky. Thanks for the great PR, guys.

Still, there do seem some openly gay men who enjoy hanging around restrooms or rest stops for just this sort of activity, or at least giving it a try when they have the opportunity. Maybe it is a kind of adventure. Maybe they enjoy the excitement of the uncertain possibility of sex. Behavioral psychologists tell us that the best way to reinforce a behavior is to provide intermittent rewards, not regular ones.

Yet I don't think that I have ever overheard any such communicative behavior or any sounds of sexual activity any time I have had to use a public restroom. That suggests that it is pretty inconspicuous. So where do these (alleged) complaints come from? No one who doesn't want to participate need respond to signals. They probably don't even recognize them as signals unless they are looking for them. And how is any third party harmed by any of this?

I am no fan of Larry Craig. But even if the arresting officer is telling the truth (and it is always wise to be skeptical of vice officers), I have a hard time seeing anything that happened as illegal. Homosexual sex is legal, after all. And people assume they have privacy in their stalls. At most Craig was sending an invitation to engage in legal sex.

Nor does anything that allegedly happened amount to "lewd conduct." Craig tapped his foot, then moved his foot to touch the other person's foot. But Craig moved his foot only because he had a foot-tapping response from the other party. Had the officer not provided that enticement, Craig would presumably not have proceeded. Where is the lewdness? No wonder that charge was dropped. And what was "disorderly" (the vaguest of all charges) about contact between seemingly consenting adults?

And, really, if public establishments seriously wish to prevent sex between men in separate restroom stalls, why don't they simply build the partitions all the way to the floor. That would be an easy way to end the problem!

It's easy to sneer at Larry Craig.

Maybe too easy.

He practically has a target tattooed on his forehead-or perhaps I should say on his ass.

It's fun to sling arrows at that target. It's such an easy one to hit. So, well, wide.

Heh heh.

Why not laugh? After all, the guy is a hypocrite, right? He says over and over again that he's not gay - and yet he plead guilty in June to disorderly conduct in a men's room, legal jargon for saying that he was trying to solicit sex from another man.

He plead guilty to trying to have sex with another man-and yet he has been remarkably unsympathetic to gay issues, voting against us being treated equally in marriage, the military and the workplace.

He says he has done nothing wrong and has nothing to be ashamed of-yet rumors that he has slept with (or tried to sleep with) men have been persisting at least since 1982, when he sent out a strange, preemptive press release denying he had slept with Congressional pages (strange because no one had accused him of anything). What is a preemptive press release but a sure sign of feeling ashamed?

He proclaims that the officer's accusations are unfounded-and yet not only did he plead guilty to June's encounter, but another man came forward in May to say that Craig had sex with him in a public bathroom in Washington's Union Station in 2004.

Zzzzing! Let's get him. Hypocrites are fair game. Let's trot out our sarcasm and our best one-liners and see if we can be the one to make people laugh the loudest.

And yet . . . And yet. I find the smile freezing on my face when I put his behavior in context.

Because the Larry Craig story is the worst thing to happen to gays and lesbians in a very long time.

It it makes me uneasy that men who want to have sex with men are still being targeted in public restrooms by police officers. The whole arcane ritual these sex-seekers do (which now is hardly a secret, since every major news organization has done a bathroom expose this week), including using shopping bags to hide their legs and a slow dance of toe-tapping and hand-waving are clearly designed so that innocents don't need to worry about being targeted or exposed to sex they don't want.

But this is not just about the police sting. It's about the media and the public's reaction to news of the police sting.

America isn't coming off a week of sleaze with the understanding that people who are the most anti-gay are usually so because they are terrified of their own closet impulses. Mr. Red State isn't sitting back in his easy chair and thinking, "Those gays sure have a raw deal. Maybe this wouldn't happen any more if they were just given the chance to live openly, marry, serve in the military, and work without fearing discrimination."

America is coming off a week of sleaze that showcased "gay" men having illicit, "disgusting" bathroom sex. Our respectability and normalcy both slipped a few notches, thanks to Larry Craig.

In a week when we should have been focused on the happy news that Iowa had declared gay marriages legal for a few hours; in a week when we should have been promoting, once again, our stability, seriousness, and ability to commit to family life; in a week when we should have been able to sit back and applaud as an Iowa judge made his case for our equality, we instead were forced to listen, over and over again, to graphic dissections of the sex habits of some men who have sex with men.

Instead of being won over by the sweet sight of two young men kissing with happiness after being wed, Americans instead turned away in disgust while watching bathroom exposes which painted gay men as agents of sexual and moral degeneracy.

This is not good.

Once again, we are being defined by what we do sexually instead of who we love, who we commit to, what we believe in.

No, I can't laugh at Larry Craig, because his downfall hurts us more than any of his anti-gay senate or congress votes.

I can't shoot an arrow at Larry Craig because it is not an arrow at all, but a boomerang, and it takes down all of us.

Jim West, Jim McGreevey, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Bob Allen, David Vitter. Now Larry Craig.

Public figures' getting caught with their pants down is nothing new. What is new is a high-tech culture that makes exposure likely, rapid, and widespread. Larry Craig pleaded guilty to "disorderly conduct" in Minnesota in the hopes that no one would notice in his home state of Idaho. A quarter-century ago, when Craig started his congressional career, that strategy might actually have worked.

For those who haven't been following the news: Craig is a U.S. Senator who was arrested in June for soliciting sex in a Minneapolis airport men's room. He also happens to be a staunch opponent of gay rights, with a zero voting scorecard from the Human Rights Campaign.

People love sex scandals, and they especially love a sex scandal that brings a moralistic finger-wagger to his knees (ahem). Perhaps that's why the above list -taken from recent memory, and by no means exhaustive-includes only one Democrat. Liberals enjoy sex as much as anyone, and they surely have their skeletons. But when someone soliciting forbidden sex is known for railing against sexual sin, it makes for a juicier story.

What is striking about the Craig saga is this: despite his over thirty years of public service, virtually no one rallied to his defense. Conservatives view him as a deviant. (Mitt Romney, whose Idaho presidential campaign Craig had chaired, referred to Craig's behavior as "disgusting" before the senator even had an opportunity to release a statement.) Liberals view him as a hypocrite. Absolutely no one views him as credible. (His claim that he touched the arresting officer's foot because he has a "wide stance" rang especially hollow.)

Various sides in the culture wars will try to make an example of Craig. Gay-rights opponents will spin the story as further evidence of homosexuality's sordid nature, not to mention its vicious power. After all, if seemingly God-fearing men like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig can succumb to such behavior, who among us is safe?

Gay-rights advocates, by contrast, will spin it as evidence of the dangers of the closet. After all, openly gay people generally neither want nor need to troll restrooms for clandestine encounters.

The opponents are right to point out that sex is powerful, in a way that can make smart people do dumb, sometimes disastrous things. They're wrong to think that this point is any more applicable to homosexuality than to heterosexuality (note Vitter's name in the list above).

True, straight people don't typically seek sex in public restrooms. But that's partly because (1) public restrooms are mostly segregated by sex and (2) "quickie" sex is anatomically less convenient for women-which still hasn't prevented some from joining the "mile high club" in cramped airplane lavatories.

The bigger reason is (3) straight people don't feel the desperate need to conceal their erotic interests in the way closeted gay people do.

And that's where gay-rights advocates make a decisive point: the culture of the closet is unhealthy for everyone involved. Lying about one's sex life makes it easier to lie about other things; it also precludes the counsel of friends in an area where such counsel is desperately needed. (See previous point about sex being powerful.)

Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank put it well in a Newsweek interview regarding the Mark Foley scandal: "Being in the closet doesn't make you do dumb things, doesn't justify you doing dumb things, it just makes them likelier." Frank should know: he was once embroiled in a scandal of his own involving a gay prostitute living in his Washington apartment during the 1980's, when Frank was still closeted.

I'll concede one point to gay-rights opponents: the fact that Larry Craig sought sex with men doesn't prove he was wrong to condemn gay marriage, oppose workplace protections for gays, or support the military ban. He was wrong about those things independently of his sex life. In any case, our lives don't always reflect our best judgment.

But the fact that Larry Craig sought sex with men does mean that he ought to have mustered more compassion for gays than his public stance suggested. (It's one area where his stance was decidedly narrow.)

It's easy to call Craig a deviant, a liar, and a hypocrite. It's hard to feel compassion for someone who showed little of it to those who deal openly with challenges he knew privately. But compassion is still a virtue. Craig may not deserve it, but right now, he desperately needs it.