Public Toilet, Private Sex: Senator Larry Craig, “Hypocrisy” and The Closet

Finally! Pulling together this analysis has been like pulling teeth. Up until a few days ago, when it was preempted by anticipation of Britney’s comeback and the oh-so-utterly-impossible-to-anticipate contents of the Petraeus report, the Larry Craig scandal was on everyone’s mind. And certainly, I’ve set a precedent in this blog for discussing sex crimes, sodomy and men’s bathrooms, among other related matters. It seems inevitable that I should have something to say on this new and still-relatively-topical issue. It’s just taken a while to figure out what precisely that commentary might be, but perhaps now I’m ready to engage in some productive analytical meandering.

I think of myself (perhaps self-indulgently) as being radically sex-positive in my outlook. Sex is not merely an enjoyable pastime, or potential source of fleeting happiness. At its best, it constitutes its own topos parallel to or overlapping the rest of the world, an odd borderland between public and private, spoken and unspoken, in which fertile potential exists for liberatory moments and subversive revelations. Just because sex has all of this radical potential (and I’m defining “sex” far more broadly than others might) doesn’t make it innocuous. In fact, if it is to maintain this potential, it cannot be purely innocuous.

There is strong socio-political pressure to promote and accept that non-married, un-sanctified sexual behavior may be worthwhile only if it is utterly toothless, banal “lovemaking” by a committed pair of near-aged adults. Preferably with the lights off. Fucking or being fucked by a potentially dangerous stranger in a public toilet, as Senator Craig was apparently wont to do, is clearly not in line with this model. Just as clear, however, is the fact that participation in this kind of encounter does not always stem from closeted-ness and the inability of participants to live openly gay lives. Plenty of openly gay individuals may participate in “cottaging” and other such practices, although in so doing they risk being admonished by those intent on mainstreaming gay culture.

Rendering unsanctified, traditionally unacceptable sex “non-threatening” to the mainstream has often involved a kind of community-enforced sexual self-censorship. There was an element of this in the Joy of Sex-style Sexual Revolution of the 1970s. The same phenomenon is very much at play in today’s mainstream gay-rights activism. Ultimately, the oppressiveness of constant exhortations to be always shiny, happy, healthy, loving and above-all public citizens has forced many folks of queer disposition to wonder precisely what kind of deal they are being offered by the activists who claim to be defending their interests.

Senator Craig has been left high and dry by Republican leadership. But he has also been noticeably left hanging by mainstream gay activism. Take a look at GLAAD’S “Recommendations for Media Covering Revelations about Senator Larry Craig,” and you’ll get a sense of where that neat-suited and sensibly-coiffed organization stands on the issue. From a queer-friendly, post-structuralist, Foucault-afficianado, Butler-reading perspective, I have found myself to be somewhat intrigued by left-wing and right-wing reactions to the plight of Senator Craig.

Of course, Craig is a Republican. In general, I strongly dislike Republicans, particularly Republican politicians, and am disinclined to feel or exhibit any sympathy for them. Racist, sexist, homophobic deathmongers, they cast votes against the poor to keep a class of workers desperate for paltry, unliveable wages, while spouting quasi-Christian hate/fear rhetoric in pandering to intolerant, ignorant voters. As several friends can attest, I’ve quite vocally proposed that Republicans not be allowed to have sex. For the most part, this stance derives from my simple belief that Republicans should not be allowed to be happy.  

My point here is that I’m not interested in defending Craig as a politician, or, really, as a human being. His racist statement that “fraud is in the culture of Iraqis” and suggestion that the people blasted by Hurricane Katrina had a similar cultural deficiency is plenty of evidence that this is not a man with whom I’d like to throw in my lot. But I must say that I’m much more comfortable accusing him of fraud, or, indeed, hypocrisy about fraudulent behavior, than I am accusing him of being a hypocrite about his own sex.

Republican politicians bank on (or perhaps truly buy into, occasionally) the sex-negative prudishness of a particular, modern, post-Enlightenment Christianity. And when the details of their own lives show them to be well-acquainted with the activities against which they preach – or vote – we rage at them for their inconsistency. Craig has been repeatedly lambasted for hypocrisy, but an accusation so worded suggests specifically that he “professes beliefs and opinions that he does not hold in order to conceal his real feelings or motives.” But to what extent is this really a valid accusation? What assumptions do such accusations of hypocrisy suggest, and how might alternate interpretations prove useful?

I’ve had no luck tracking down recorded incidents of Craig speaking against homosexuality (not to say they don’t exist). One thing we can be sure of, however, is that Craig has a record of voting against the protection of equal rights for people who are openly gay. He has clearly not supported protecting the civil rights of gay Americans who are out, and who do not wish to obsessively and excruciatingly subdivide their lives into a public civic life and private sexual life.

This issue of public vs. private is significant to the degree of being completely central – what is “the closet,” after all, but a metaphor for the movement between public and private? In gaining the privilege of being public, gay men and lesbians are called on to give up the privilege of being private. Of course, the “privilege” of being public is no minor thing. People are still being killed for their sexuality and sexual practice, still being beaten and harassed by civilians and ‘law enforcement’ alike. Individuals identifying as gay or lesbian have every right to demand a society in which their participation in the public sphere need not involve secrecy, shame, or fear.

However, while never wanting to undermine that fundamental premise, certain branches of queer theorizing have examined the other effects of the compulsory claiming and performance of a public gay identity. Before we name something, before we place it in a clear category, it has a breadth and indeterminacy and undecided quality that might feel a bit like actual freedom, a bit like real subjectivity. Before we round up someone’s sex and stamp it “Gay!” or “Straight!” doesn’t it seem possible that their sexuality could actually be…anything? A mystery? An unnamed thing, which the bearer gets to make up all on his or her own? In order to participate in the struggle for the right to be public, individuals must sacrifice some of their own indeterminacy and autonomy in their creation of self and sexuality. The notion of “queering” sometimes manifests itself as a reclaiming of indeterminacy, and a resistance to the modern mainstream’s obsession with inflexible binaries. 

One of the debates that surrounds the discourse on Craig’s circumstances involves the question of whether we should collectively roast him over a fire for his hypocrisy, or, alternately, have empathy for him, taking his participation in furtive sexual practices as a symptom of his fear and shame about his homosexuality. The idea that Craig is closeted in a sort of “classic” sense has been presented often in the discourse surrounding the scandal. In this model, he is “really gay,” but because of his age and the time and details of his upbringing he has never been able to come to terms with his “natural” sexuality. What makes him a hypocrite, to many, is Craig’s proactive pursuit of gay sex. Accepting a premise of a singular, binarized natural sexuality (straight or gay) to which one is born and with which one must come to terms, this active engagement indicates self-knowledge of himself as ‘gay,’ as defined within a binary model.

But what if Craig is merely resisting the choice between two impossible extremes of an inflexible binary? Craig’s political actions are only hypocritical if his “professed beliefs and opinions” don’t match up with his “concealed feelings and motives.” He is a hypocrite if he publicly denies a nature that he believes himself to have. But Craig has voted against protecting equal civil rights for individuals who do not conceal their sexuality, and make the nature of their sexual practice public, even as he himself has done his best to keep his sexual practices concealed, anonymous, and distinct from his civic life. (Granted, the ambiguous public-private nature of a “public toilet” as a venue for “private acts” does add a certain tension to this whole argument.)

In the past two years, six of the seven most notable sex scandals in U.S. politics have involved male Republicans caught out engaging in homosexual practices. Senator Craig is only the most recent in a list that includes Young Republican Glenn Murphy Jr., Bob Allen (R-FL), Mark Foley (R-FL), faux White House journalist Jeff Gannon, and Spokane’s late Republican mayor Jim West. Fascinating tales all, and not least because they suggest a great deal of territory in the nexus of sexuality, politics, and masculinity that we have yet to fully explore.

These men aren’t unaware of the sex they’re having. Nor are they likely to be unaware of their own power as individuals. They can’t all be unaware of their options, of the everpresent option to reinvent themselves in such a way as to live openly, and out, and gay. When their sexuality is forced into the media spotlight, these men have responded in different ways. And, in fact, the cases themselves are markedly different – ages, marital status, and the nature of the sexual practice under scrutiny. But all six men made the choice to engage in their homosexual practice in secrecy, in privacy, in a state of concealment. And all six men made political choices to reinforce a socio-political climate that requires, encourages – and perhaps most significantly enables and renders sensible – concealed, furtive, subculture-based sexual practice.

There are actually a few ways to interpret these facts. The standard interpretation might be that these men’s crippling horror at their own nature manifests itself in a double-life and a best-defense-equals-good-offense strategy of coverup in the political arena. Simply put, in this explanatory model, all actions of the gay right-winger stem from shame. Somehow, after reviewing details of, in particular, the cases of Foley, Gannon, and West, this explanation seems less compelling. Here’s another option: the culture and power-dynamics of furtive, secret, subcultural sex between men is gratifying for its participants. In preserving a social and political environment that requires, enables, and renders sensible such activity, what is actually preserved is a source of gratification.

Let me wind down my analysis by going far, far out on a limb. We rage at Senator Craig for hypocrisy because he confuses the hell out of us. We try to locate him within the victim vs. victimizer binary upon which old-school feminisms and the mainstream gay rights movement still heavily depend, and find it impossible to decide whether he is a poor, scared (thus implicitly ‘feminine’) victim of intolerant ideology, or a power-and-pleasure-taking (thus implicitly ‘masculine) patriarchal powermonger.

But perhaps Craig’s political actions don’t appear hypocritical at all if we view them as attempts, from a seat of great power, to privilege (or perhaps even preserve?) one set of homoerotics in relation to another. The homoerotics of the right-wing are perhaps easier to apprehend than we might first think. The left, generally, has been happy to imagine that all homosexual behavior amongst right-wingers is characterized by self-hatred and denial to peers, public, and self. But what if this is not so at all?

What if there is a whole, coherent culture out there of conservative men with wives and money, who fuck other men or are fucked by them? It would have something to do with military culture, of course. It would have to do with being a “real man,” being part of a male community, and with maintaining a clear line of dominance and hierarchy. Violence and sexual assault of-men-by-men would be treated as par-for-the-course, and consequences for such behavior would be minimized. But this kind of practice would also have to do with mentorship, and a paternal or brotherly sort of guidance, networking, and professional benefit. In some ways this particular kind of male homosexual culture would have a great deal in common with the oft-referenced patterns of homosexuality and homosociality in ancient Greek martial, political, and intellectual contexts.

Framing this as some sort of back room secret society is, of course, a little ridiculous, and not my intention at all. I said I was going out on a limb, and I’m quite conscious of being there. I suppose my aim is to redeploy, in the arena of contemporary socio-politics surrounding sexuality, an already very common perception of military culture and male cultures of power as being somewhat homoerotically charged. How might these fields interact? What may we do with this?

Larry Craig is merely a placeholder. On that level I do feel something approaching compassion for the man. Just a simple married rancher with too much money and a longstanding appetite for cock, he has become the blank center upon which a raging, embattled storm of cultural conflict is projected. Then again, he’s a total asshole when it comes to Iraq and Louisiana. So…fuck him.