Friday, September 7, 2007

He ain't dirty. He's my brother.


Drawing of Saint Francis embracing a leper from "St. Francis and the Leper - A Meditation"

Does anyone dare to express sympathy for Larry Craig?

Perhaps the gay and lesbian community will embrace him, and give him shelter in his time of need. But our memories are just long enough to remember his hypocrisy, and our vision just long enough to see the tempting fruit of holy (legal) matrimony.

But what about all those other men whose lives are disrupted by these sting operations? What about these sting operations in general? Could we get some community outrage about that?

Here's what GLAAD has to say about cruising:

GLAAD urges media developing such stories – whether separately or as part of their coverage of Sen. Craig – to place them in context by consulting credible experts who can discuss whether such behavior is reflective of any healthy orientation, gay or straight. Gershen Kaufman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Michigan State University, yesterday told ABC News, "[C]ruising is practiced mainly by deeply closeted men...There is a lot of self-hatred and shame, and they can't allow themselves to come to terms with their sexuality."

Additionally noteworthy is the fact that such behavior is being condemned by gay and straight people alike. Intimations that gay Americans broadly object to the enforcement of laws against this kind of activity simply are not supported by the facts and should be avoided.

Finally, GLAAD stresses the importance for reporters to note that these kinds of furtive activities stand in stark contrast to the loving commitments that gay couples everywhere are making to care for each other and for their families.

"GLAAD Provides Recommendations For Media Covering Revelations About Senator Larry Craig", August 30, 2007

Why the cold shoulder?


Samuel Delany pretty much described the psychology of both our oppressors and those of us who feel guilty about being oppressed and envious of the privileges of those to the (hetero) manor born:

We are guilty that we are not them - are not those boys destined to run the systems and cities of the world: that puts a rift between us. They, on the other hand, are terrified, lest through some inexplicable accident, some magic happenstance of sympathy or contagion, they might become us. In most of them, we know, that terror can be repressed before adolescent curiosity. But we also know that that terror, given the license of adult exercise in the darkness of unquestioned moral right, can assume murderous proportions: our deviance, our abnormalities, our perversions are needed to define, to create, to constitute them and make them visible to each other and to themselves.


- The Mad Man, 155-156

Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

Some historians and other activists have criticized the GLAAD-style response:

Where the Craig "spectacle" departs from earlier ones is that some in the gay and lesbian community are participating in humiliating Craig or saying nothing as he has been attacked. Most of the leading gay groups have been silent, making no comment on Craig or the suspect police tactics used in the sting.

William K. Dobbs, a gay civil libertarian, described the performance of the gay groups as "Abysmal, absolutely abysmal. It seems the only sexual behavior they care about these days is within the context of marriage."


- "Troubling Questions in Craig's Fall", Duncan Osborne in Gay City News, 9/6/2007.

There's also a surprisingly compassionate mention in a conservative column in Newsweek:

Craig's unravelling involved a sadness almost unfathomable to anyone who has not felt it necessary to live, as he seems to have done for years, disguising one's nature. The fact that Craig deepened his misery with an absurd "explanation" that was, in its way, lewd increased the duty to feel compassion for him. But the presidential candidate he supported quickly pounced, issuing a statement devoid of human sympathy. Craig, said Mitt Romney, seizing yet another opportunity to stroke social conservatives, "reminds us of Mark Foley and Bill Clinton" and, "frankly, it's disgusting."


- "Now, Defining Decency Down", George F. Will in Newsweek, 9/10/2007.

It isn't all good news(week)

Of course, in that same issue of Newsweek, you have an article basically canonizing the police officer who arrested Craig. He gets described as "sincere and soft-spoken", "laid-back, smooth", a "humble, hard worker". The sting operation, in turn, was "not glamorous work".

There's also a bit where Newsweek describes a previous arrest that the officer made in the same bathroom, in which "rather than humiliate the man with a showy arrest next to the stalls, [the officer] quietly led him away."

Could this possibly be because a big public arrest would basically put everybody in that bathroom on notice, driving the arrest rate down, and requiring these "hard working" police officers actually go somewhere else and tackle real social problems? Or maybe because a big public arrest would be so obviously excessive and distasteful that the whole practice of sting operations would be called into question?

No. Newsweek would rather have us believe that it's because the officer was "being respectful".

With Friends Like These

To return to the GLAAD advice for a bit, let me be tactfully understated: there are some problems.

What exactly is GLAAD's point of view? Despite the (understandably) mealy-mouthed nature of their recommendations, I think we can glean the following:

1) Cruising reflects an unhealthy "orientation".
2) Gay Americans are probably okay with the enforcement of "decency" laws. Possibly even when it involves the state merrily dancing right up to the line of entrapment.
3) Cruising is the "polar opposite" of committed gay relationships.

It's hard to decide which of these statements is the most appalling and why.

Is it the joylessness and sex-negativity of (1) and (3)?

Or perhaps it's the nonchalant acceptance of marginal sexualities as criminal/pathological in (1) and (2).

Or maybe it's the willingness to engage in divisiveness in the service of political acceptability evidenced by (2) and (3).

What GLAAD's message here boils down to, not to put too fine a point on it, is: "Please don't confuse the good, upright, reasonably chaste gay citizen couples with those sick, lawless men who have sex in bathrooms. Unlike them, we deserve the rights and privileges you're still denying us."

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