First published in the Chicago Free Press on Sept. 5, 2007
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.