aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Mike Rogers on how Matt Lauer blew the interview
Via Pam Spaulding, “They cover Craig’s belief that he is not gay, because he associates “gay” not with the sex, but his perception of the “lifestyle”—meaning out of the closet in your everyday life. So it’s plausible deniability in Craig’s mind that he’s not living the lifestyle he disapproves of, he just has gay sex...”
LATER: Crooks and Liars has Pat Buchanan on the same show discussing whether or not Larry Craig should go.
Craig family values
So long as Larry’s out their, wife on display, peddling his not gay, just clueless line it’s worth remembering:
As part of the effort to rehabilitate the reputation and save the political career of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, his children Michael Craig and Shae Howell spoke to ABC News’ “Good Morning America” [in September] to testify that their father isn’t gay and was not in fact guilty of the lewd conduct for which he was arrested.
Michael Craig said his father was simply “a victim of circumstance” who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
But the criminal records of Michael Craig and his sister, whom Sen. Craig adopted after marrying their mother, Suzanne, in 1983, not only call into question their credibility as character witnesses but may even further undermine Craig’s portrayal of himself as a defender of family values.
At least two women have sought restraining orders against Michael Craig, who was once charged with statutory rape, though the charge was dismissed. He did not return a call for comment. And at the time of Howell’s appearance on “Good Morning America” there was a warrant out for her arrest resulting from her allegedly breaking into her estranged husband’s home and destroying property.
Of course, wouldn’t it have been better had ABC found that information out before the interview and included it there?
Gays in bathrooms? Not so many. (Reprise)
Stephen H. Miller quotes Matt:
On Tuesday, NBC’s Matt Lauer, interviewing Sen. Larry Craig, said (as I took it down): "the report says that you followed a well known pattern of behavior by members of the gay community seeking sex in restrooms." Hmmm, I thought GLAAD had educated these guys?
Setting aside the snark, I use the occasion to reprise an old post…
Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate, quotes Laud Humphreys 1970 dissertation, Tea Room Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (available in its entirety through Google Book Search):
[Disgraced Senator Larry] Craig leaves as his political legacy the telling phrase “wide stance,” which may or may not join “big tent” and “broad church” as an attempt to make the Republican Party seem more “inclusive” than it really is.
But there’s actually a chance-a 38 percent chance, to be more precise-that the senator can cop a plea on the charge of hypocrisy. In his study of men who frequent public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys discovered that 54 percent were married and living with their wives, 38 percent did not consider themselves homosexual or bisexual, and only 14 percent identified themselves as openly gay. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Personal Places, a doctoral thesis which was published in 1970, detailed exactly the pattern-of foot-tapping in code, hand-gestures, and other tactics-which has lately been garishly publicized at a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport men’s room. The word tearoom seems to have become archaic, but in all other respects the fidelity to tradition is impressive.
The men interviewed by Humphreys wanted what many men want: a sexual encounter that was quick and easy and didn’t involve any wining and dining. Some of the heterosexuals among them had also evolved a tactic for dealing with the cognitive dissonance that was involved. They compensated for their conduct by adopting extreme conservative postures in public. Humphreys, a former Episcopalian priest, came up with the phrase “breastplate of righteousness” to describe this mixture of repression and denial. So, it is quite thinkable that when Sen. Craig claims not to be gay, he is telling what he honestly believes to be the truth.
I am interested to see that the number of men having sex in bathrooms who don’t identify as straight has apparently gone up! Major Darryl Tolleson of the Atlanta Police Department:
The majority of these men, they have families...You would think that it would be a gay issue but overhwhelmingly more and more, we’re seeing that these are people with families.
American University anthropology Professor William Leap has spent more than a decade researching male sex in public places. In 1999, he edited an academic compilation called Public Sex/Gay Space. His conclusion is that up to half of the men who seek this kind of sex are not gay.
If the goal is to get men out of bathrooms, it seems that reducing stigma - say by legalizing gay marriage - is the way to go. But then those straight-identified men would have to forgo their thrill:
In my youth, I was a friend of a man named Tom Driberg, a British politician who set the bar very high in these matters… What Driberg told me was this. The thrills were twofold. First came the exhilaration of danger: the permanent risk of being caught and exposed. Second was the sense of superiority that a double life could give. What bliss it was to enter the House of Commons, bow to the speaker, and take your seat amid the trappings of lawmaking, having five minutes earlier fellated a guardsman (and on one unforgettable occasion, a policeman) in the crapper in St. James’ Park. Assuming the story about the men’s room in Union Station to be true, Sen. Craig could have gone straight from that encounter to the Senate floor in about the same amount of time.
RELATED: New York Magazine’s Married Man Seeks Same for Discreet Play:
He has a loving wife, a small child-and sex with men on the side. How the Internet has made it easier than ever to lead a detection-proof double life.
He hooks up using Craigslist.
Get real people!!! These are not gay problems. These are problems caused by straights in denial and enabled by bad public policy that wastes resources on cops sitting in mens rooms when they might better be somewhere else!
Top Library Blogs
Lots of talk of library blogs here. For the occasion I share the Meredith Farkas ("Librarian, writer and tech geek") Favorite blogs - List and Commentary:
The Top 10
3. Information Wants to be Free
5. Tame the Web
(for the rest of the results [please click here)
What can we learn from this? That no top ___ librar* blogs list is going to be definitive? That it doesn’t matter all that much as long as you enjoy what you’re doing as a blogger? How about all of the above?
As I had predicted, the top 10 list is a good bit different from the top 10 list on the OEDB site. The three blogs with the most Bloglines subscribers (librarian.net, The Shifted Librarian and Library Stuff) are not the top 3 favorite blogs, though they are not surprisingly in the top 10. Some of blogs did better and some did worse. It seems like any measure you use, you will get different results.
The strong manipulative potential of gossip
Gossip is more powerful than truth, a study showed on Monday, suggesting people believe what they hear through the grapevine even if they have evidence to the contrary.
Researchers, testing students using a computer game, also found gossip played an important role when people make decisions, said Ralf Sommerfeld, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, who led the study.
“We show that gossip has a strong influence… even when participants have access to the original information as well as gossip about the same information,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Thus, it is evident that gossip has a strong manipulative potential.”
Via Digby, “And that is exactly why the Republicans use it so successfully and why the media busybodies are committing malpractice when they eagerly pass it on, even if they’re marginally true.”
