Domino Effect

Sen. Larry Craig denied in his arrest interview he was trying to engage in lewd behavior in an airport bathroom and suggested he was entrapped by the arresting officer, according to audiotape of the interview released Thursday.

"I sit down to go to the bathroom, and you said our feet bumped," Craig told an officer. "I believe they did ... because I reached down and scooted over and the next thing I knew, under the bathroom divider comes a card that says 'police.' "

Oh, whatever, dude. The cop solicited me. I was afraid of the large black policeman so I offered to blow him for $20. Plus it was thundering outside. I was just joking around with those underage boys. Wasn't me. I'm. Not. Gay.

What. The fuck. Ever.

Message to active anti-gay legislators: this is your fucking legacy. Not the buttressing of marriage's sanctity, in either theory or practice. Not the uplifting of public morality. Not anything you've convinced your voting bloc you've actually done with any of your anti-hate crime, anti-ENDA, pro-DOMA votes. All you've done is made the closet door that much more unbreachable for people on the politically and socially conservative half of the spectrum. You have created a climate of false dichotomy in which people who realize they're attracted to their own gender feel pressured to either identify with Teh Gay Stereotype you reinforce at every turn, or to remain silent and invisible, conforming to your "pro-family" voting, wife-and-kids norm during the day and sneaking out to the nearest park or train station can at night to get some same-sex action.

You privately acknowledge and accept gay staffers and then claim their personal lives are no one's business when you get called on your hypocrisy. Then you turn around and make everyone else's personal lives your professional business by repeatedly and publically refusing to support equal rights legislation for gay folk, by repeatedly and publically reducing our entire existences to sex acts that you then equate to criminal and heinously abusive practices in which the concept of "consent" never sees the light of day.

And you wonder why the gay men in your ranks crumple under the pressure and enter into dishonest relationships in order to conform to the facade of "normalcy" you demand.

Initially, I got angry at guys like Craig, Bob Allen, and Mark Foley. Their hypocrisy of voting against gay rights on the job while seeking out gay sex in their off hours still disgusts me. But as a GOP legislator being exposed as on the Down Low has become as regular and predictable as Monday coming round every week, my anger is being replaced with sadness that people are still unable to live their lives honestly and openly, their intrinsic natures so completely incompatible with the belief system and political group they've allied themselves with that they are compelled to seek out same-gender contact under the radar. All so that the Evangelical Right can be mollified.

Now that the lives being destroyed are starting to hail from the conservative community, what are the hopes for a more sane official approach to sexual orientation by their leadership? Still close to zero? That's truly sad.