Senator Larry Craig

Watching Senator Craig opine “I am not gay” was surreal.  If Senator Craig believed that he was gay, it is quite likely that he would not have ended up in a tearoom cruising scenario and become a part of a sting operation.   For those who wish to maintain a heterosexual facade  and are same sex attracted,  mens rooms have functioned for persons of this genre as a psuedo public and pseudo private cruising ground.  As pointed out by Laud Humphreys in his infamous study TEAROOM TRADE, heterosexually married homosexually attracted men have found such scenes particularly attractive for impersonal sex in a same sex setting in which any man can enter with no implication concerning ones sexuality.   Bathrooms in transient settings, such as roadside bathrooms and airport restrooms facilitate said impersonality.  Of course, the Senator has put not only his career at risk but also his his friends, relatives and wife to whom he probably lied to about who he is in his attempt at passing.  Of course, the Senator Craigs of this world have lived lives via passing in a breastplate of righteousness; they did not flaunt their homosexuality but rather denied and repressed, a denial and repression that was a product of homophobia.  How tragic!  I remember when I was doing research in the 1970s on heterosexually married homosexually attracted men, I was particularly taken by one man who I had interviewed- he was about 50 at the time of the interview, and had accepted himself as being homesexual for the last 5 years.  Prior to that time he had denied to himself he was homosexual, had heterosexually married and was the father of two children.   At the time of his arrest in a mens room for soliciting sex, he had been a minister for some 20 years.  The woman he had married who he had always loved and always lied to was traumatized and humiliated by his arrest; she saw her primary role in life as being the minister’s wife.  Unfortunately, she dealt with the situation by taking a gun and killing herself.  Her husband when I interviewed him was overwhelmed with guilt and bemoaned the fact he could not have come to terms with his homosexuality at younger age so that he would not have involved an innocent woman who married him and believed in him.  At the time of the interview he was giving all the support he could to his son who was gay and was a president of a university gay students union.  What a difference a generation made.  Of course, the irony being he did whatt the dominant society wanted him to do- pass as straight, providing homage to the powers that be.  Now those powers will be morally outraged, will distance themselves from this disgusting pervert believing that they had nothing to do with how this man ending up living his life, living a life of lies; I guess such a life is not all that much at odds with living the political life.