A House subcommittee report released last week on the Rep. Mark Foley scandal admonishes many of his colleagues who may have known of inappropriate communications between Foley and former House pages for a "disconcerted unwillingness to take responsibility," but did not issue any formal reprimands. Thus this highly politicized "October surprise," launched in large measure by certain gay Democratic outing activists feeding pre-election reports to the media, ends with a whimper.
But the effects are not so easily dismissed. According to the Washington Blade, a Human Rights Campaign poll conducted shortly after Foley resigned showed the scandal made 23 percent of Americans feel "less favorable" toward gays, leading Matt Foreman of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force to comment, "It’s going to take us some time to make up that lost ground.... Without in any way, shape or form condoning Foley’s egregious and stupid behavior, the uproar that it caused clearly points to continuing evidence of homophobia."
As noted in this Washington Post essay by Philip Kennicott, the new movie The History Boys (based on Alan Bennett's Tony-winning play) focuses on a group of late-teen British students who take a casual attitude toward the flirtations of one of their male teachers. Kennicott points out the contrast with the hysteria unleashed in American society over any sexually tinged intersection between teenagers (especially boys) and adult men. He writes:
The American drama of sexual abuse, played out almost weekly in hysterical terms on [NBC's] "To Catch a Predator," has very little room for the larger continuum of the sexual interactions between adults and youth suggested by Bennett's play.... there is a lot more to be learned about how sex is negotiated—especially between adults and youth who are almost adults—than American popular culture is quite ready to acknowledge.