September 2, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents V Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:10 PM EST At the risk of dwelling too long on soon-to-be-former Senator Craig’s misfortunes, there are a couple of points in John Steele Gordon’s latest post that I think deserve a little extra scrutiny. The first is Mr. Gordon’s conjecture that “the persistence of ‘tearoom trade,’ as the op-ed calls it, has a lot more to do with the erotic potential of the danger involved—the thrill of getting away with something so fraught with potential consequences—than with people who engage in such behavior simply being in denial.” There may be some truth to this assertion, but in Larry Craig’s case, as in Walter Jenkins’s, and in many others as well, there’s a more persuasive explanation. For men like Craig and Jenkins, even if they admit to themselves that they are not heterosexual, surreptitious, anonymous locations like public restrooms may be the only places they can find sexual partners without endangering their careers. As men who want to succeed in professions where being homosexual or bisexual is a great liability, they cannot meet prospective partners in bars or at parties where they could be noticed. According to this New York Times editorial, which describes Laud Humphreys’s research about the “tearoom trade,” men who “troll for sex in public places” were mostly “married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.” In other words, they were men, like Craig and Jenkins, with a great deal to lose if their less conventional sexual preferences became public knowledge. They’re not thrill-seekers heading for the men’s room to risk getting exposed by the police, or by their neighbors, or on CNN. They’re people who, through some tragic set of decisions, ended up living double lives. Mr. Gordon also writes that “in fairness to” Senator Coleman and Governor Romney, who described Larry Craig’s behavior as “disgusting,” “what they found disgusting was not Larry Craig or his homosexuality per se but his behavior in a public restroom.” This is, at best, a distinction without a difference. What Larry Craig did in that men’s room was tap his right foot and end up in the middle of a police sting. The same Times article cited above describes how signals like Craig’s foot-tapping only lead to explicit sexual advances when they are answered by similar signals. If the police officer next to Craig hadn’t decided to goad him on, the senator’s behavior would have been limited to that tapping of his foot. I don’t really know why his congressional colleagues would find that action repellent. But of course, it’s not what Craig did in a restroom that McCain and Coleman find objectionable. It’s what he wanted to do, which was liaise with a man—perhaps in the restroom, but perhaps elsewhere. It is hard to see why this behavior should merit the adjective “disgusting,” especially when no such term was thrown at Sen. David Vitter after he admitted to hiring prostitutes, or when, in 2004, the D.C. police department had to visit then-Congressman Don Sherwood’s apartment to stop him from beating and throttling his mistress. Now, lest I give the wrong impression, my sympathy for Senator Craig, while substantial, is limited. If the man was guilty of anything, though, it wasn’t gross public indecency but rather gross public hypocrisy. Laura Mac Donald’s article today draws exactly the right lesson from this whole affair: “Let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.” If something good were to come of Senator Craig’s humiliation, it would be a greater sense of humility on the part of public figures who are all too ready to invade and judge Americans’ personal lives, and a greater degree of reluctance on the part of voters who are all too ready to help them. A final note, following up on my first post about this subject several days ago. Also in today’s New York Times is an op-ed by the documentarian Seth Randal and the Boise State University archivist Alan Virta about the 1955 gay sex scandal in Boise, Idaho. It’s a useful contribution to the ongoing discussion of Senator Craig’s rapid downfall, and a nuanced meditation on exactly what kind of progress has been made in the last 50 years.
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