Cottaging Confusion

I heard this commentary opinion piece by Scott Simon on Weeekend Edition this past Saturday. Scott talks about the Larry Craig scandal and how he does not care for the schadenfreude that episodes such as this elicit from those who like to see right wing, gay bashing hypocrites exposed. In Scott's opinion, the exposure of these guys comes at a great cost in that it condones police setting out to entrap "deviants" who are engaging in legal sexual behavior, albeit behind closed doors, leading to the ruining of lives, marriages and reputations. To him, this is a great waste of police resources, not to mention prurient and anachronistic.

I like Scott and tend to agree with him, but I don't know how I feel about this one. I agree that the police have no business in people's consensual sex lives and that they have far greater fish to fry, but I am also absolutely one of those who rejoices in the outing of assholes like Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, and the scores of upper crusty British Lords who have been caught with their fishnets down on Clapham Common throughout the years. Despite recent "advances" - the shift from "do ask, do tell" to "don't ask, don't tell", the fact that Carson Kressley is one of America's most trusted celebrity endorsers, the now-proven lack of total career destruction that results from coming out - homophopia is still incredibly rife. I certainly encounter more casual homophobia than racism. Whether this is because homophobia is truly more prevalent or because people tend to think it's acceptable to be homophobic more than they think it is to be racist is beside the point - in fact, the fact that so many people think it is okay to express homophobic views kind of underscores my point, which is that gays and lesbians have a responsibility to come out, and the more people who are out - voluntarily or not - the better. If people knew that even half of those who are LGBT are LGBT, people's ideas about what gay is and what it means would soon start to shift - for the better. Being in the closet is no different than passing, and we all know how people feel about passing nowadays - just look at the posthumous attention Anatole Broyard is getting.

When the film Brokeback Mountain came out, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote a truly remarkable piece in The New York Review of Books that I feel says a lot about the status of homosexuality and contemporary American society's comfort level with it. Mendelsohn was appalled at what he saw as a serious rift between everything the original novella and the film adaptation stood for and the way that the film was being marketed. The novella is very specifically about gay themes, as is the film (duh), but the marketing of the film focused heavily on the "universal" nature of a story of true love unrealized and the sorrow that results when one is not true to one's self - or more exactly, when society does not allow one to be true to one's self. Mendelsohn's point was that the torment that results from living in the closet is very different from that experienced by other star-crossed lovers - sure, biracial couples face abuse, little rich girls daddies squash their daughters dalliances with the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and religion gets in the way of true love on a regular basis. But all of these situations, horrible as they are, Mendelsohn says, result in the sufferer hating society and the people around them. It is only those in the closet who hate themselves. I wish the article was still live so I could link to it.

My point is, the closet sucks, and only contributes to the warped view of homosexuality in our society. It is precisely because of people's shame that cottaging and other anonymous sexual encounters remain so prevalent in the gay community, yet I guarantee you that most Americans think that this prevalence is because gay men are oversexed deviants who will fuck anyone with neither discernment nor concern for public health. This plays into the notion that gay men are an active threat to the heterosexuality of all straight men and children. (Please note that you rarely hear this type of language applied to the millions of straight men who patronize prostitutes anonymously and secretly without the knowledge of their familes, friends, and co-workers, and without taking health precautions).

Don't even get me started on lesbians. The dueling stereotypes of hairless bisexual porn vixen and butch bull dyke trucker persist as strongly as ever - in fact, the former only gets stronger as it is fueled by the increasingly exponential explosion of pornography. Lesbian sex exists primarily as a gimmick for men's entertainmnet and stimulation.

So yes, Scott Simon, you have a point. Outing should not be the duty of the police. But it should be the duty of someone. The media shoulders a lot of the burden, but increasingly, LGBT activists, sick of bearing the brunt of the public's hatred while their would-be comrades cower in the closet, are speaking out. Out gay men played a role in the outing of both Craig and Haggard. As far as I'm concerned, these guys are right on. People in the public eye who are financially secure and can buy their own independence, privacy, and safety owe it to the legions who have to live their lives Brokeback-styl for fear of serious reprisal. As for people in the public eye who go so far as to rail against homosexuality while engaging in it themselves - well, they deserve everything they get. It's not like they can't just sign up for GayBeGone camp and be cured, after all.

PS The painting is by Paul Cadmus, who was gay and is creditd with being among the first in American culture to really try to bring gay sex practices out of the shadows. He exposed the hypocrisy of locker room and rest room gays as early as the 1930s.