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.

A Big Gay Victory?: The Chance to Spend $25K on a “Fairy Tale Wedding”

I am a huge proponent of equal rights for our nation’s many, many gay citizens and have long been both appalled and embarrassed by the shameful and pointless refusal to grant homosexuals equal rights. So needless to say, I was thrilled to hear this morning of a major victory for the rainbow coalition. Disneyland, a place perhaps more symbolic of America than any other, will now welcome the gay population with open arms, allowing them to emerge from behind closed doors so that they too may marry in public display of saccharine overspending in the Magic Kingdom.

So let me get this straight: A shocking number of Americans persist in the belief that homosexuality is a horrible, evil affliction curable by a stay at some sort of summer camp. Not even the most liberal of politicians will find some balls and openly embrace gay marriage. Homosexuals are legally unable to visit their sick or dying partners in the hospital, and when their partners do die, they face estate and inheritance issues that straight couples will never have to deal with. If a gay person falls in love with a foreigner, the only sure way that they can be guaranteed a life together is to defraud the government with a sham straight marriage. Clearly flaming celebrities persist in the belief that it is better to live a public lie than risk the damage that coming out would do to their careers, despite the fact that a) there are openly gay entertainers who are very successful and b) they are silently reinforcing the homophobia that they themselves so fear.

Michel Foucault (who was gay, and is my hero – the two are unrelated) had a theory that society deals with that which it finds most threatening and objectionable by absorbing it into the mainstream and neutering it. As usual, he has a point. When people say “But look at how much more accepted gays are today!”, what the fuck are they talking about? Sure, there are the aforementioned openly gay celebs and gay characters on tv shows. But think of the elision between the depiction of straight romance in the media and that of gay. Gay sex is neutered – if you judge by the mainstream media, people have nothing to fear from gays because they never fuck!! They hug a whole lot, though. Scary!

Foucault would fucking love this Disney shit. It is the ultimate realization of his theory. What bigger slap in the face is there than to say “You still can’t get married in 49 states and are constitutionally forever forbidden from doing so in at least 13, but you can go right ahead and, with our blessing, pump $25,000 into the corporate behemoth that is Disneyland for the chance to be greeted by a fanfare of dressed up idiots with trumpets as your horse-drawn carriage pulls up in front of Cinderella’s castle prior to your legally meaningless civil ceremony. Rest assured that much of the income this brings in will further line the pockets of the very people who donate massive amounts of money to the Republican party and support Bush’s constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.”

The saddest part of this is that there are probably oodles of gay couples with their AmExes out as we speak, dialing Mickey to book their nuptials. There is no greater evidence of the justification for gay equal rights than this – homosexuals are just as big of jackasses as the rest of us.