Senator Larry Craig’s defiant claim that he is “not gay” is an interesting one. He didn’t say “I don’t hang around in public restrooms where men commonly have sex with men.” He said he was not “gay.”
Is it possible for a man to have sex with other men but not be “gay”? I suspect that most people would claim that a man who has sex with other men is, by that very fact, “gay.” But is it that simple?
Scientist Alfred Kinsey argued that “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” were both located on the same continuum running from “Exclusively heterosexual” to “Exclusively homosexual.” This continuum is represented in Kinsey’s scale of sexual orientation. He argued that society’s efforts to pigeonhole people into one type or the other was a political move. It was possible, according to Kinsey, that a man (or a woman) might be predominantly heterosexual, but only incidentally homosexual. Perhaps, this is what Senator Craig meant when he claimed that he was not “gay.” Perhaps he was honestly (and desperately) claiming that he liked sex with women as a rule, though he did the public restroom gig with other men on the side.
Senator Craig obviously feels the pain of the “gay” label a lot more than he feels the pain of being caught in a restroom where men commonly have sex with other men. Thus, his continued protests denying his alleged homosexuality. But maybe he’s protesting the “gay” label for yet another reason. Maybe he is honestly (and desperately) trying to communicate that he only has physical sex with men, but no emotional relationships. Preposterous? Not really.
Consider the numerous men who, though married to women and though living public lives as straight men, have repeated episodes of uncommitted sex with other men. Salon.com did an extensive piece on this phenomenon in African American communities. There, it’s called “on the down low,” or the D.L., where men lead seemingly straight lives but have sex with other men. There’s even a long tradition of how a man should solicit sex from another man in adjoining bathroom stalls–the flashing of a wedding ring in the process even makes it all the more alluring to some participants.
This phenomenon of the “down low” is not limited to African American communities. Consider this statistics reported by Medicinenet.com:
Nearly one in 10 men who say they’re straight have sex only with other men, a New York City survey finds.
And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married.
In fact, 10% of all married men in this survey report same-sex behavior during the past year.
This means safe-sex messages aimed at straight and gay men are likely missing this important subgroup . . .
There are many other examples of men who have sex with other men who don’t consider themselves “homosexual” or “gay.” These “situational homosexual” acts are reputed to be common on long tours of duty on ships and in prisons. Consider, also, ancient Greek men of stature, who commonly had sex with adolescent boys. Those boys would eventually grow up, leave their male lovers, marry yet have sex with their own male adolescent lovers.
Does this mean that Socrates was “gay”? I sometimes wonder what conservatives think, conservatives who so often preach the virtues of the Greek classics though it is clear that their literary heroes commonly had male-male sex. The Greek sexual practices have never been a secret. See, for example, Plato’s discussion of friendship in The Symposium. There is a big difference between the context of sex in ancient Greece and the current day U.S., however: “The ancient Greeks did not conceive of sexual orientation as a social identifier, as Western societies have done for the past century.
Historian Jonathan Ned Katz wrote on Kinsey continuum and the social consequences making sexuality a binary enterprise:
Kinsey also explicitly contested the idea of an absolute either/or antithesis between hetero and homo persons. Stressing the variations between exclusive heterosexual and exclusive homosexual behavior and feeling, he denied that human beings “represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual.” The world’s population, he ordered, “is not to be divided into sheep and goats.” (That revealing Biblical metaphor positions heterosexuals as sheep, coupled with conformity, and homosexuals as goats, linked with licentiousness).
The hetero/homo division of persons is not nature’s doing, Kinsey stresses, but society’s. As sex-liberal reformer, he challenged the social and historical division of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals because he saw this person-labeling used to denigrate homosexuals. Motivated by a reformist impulse, he rejected the social reality and profound subjective force of a historically constructed tradition which, since the early twentieth century in the U.S., had cut the sexual population in two–and helped to establish the social and personal reality of a heterosexual and homosexual identity. . . .
Between the 1890s and the 1960s the terms heterosexual and homosexual moved into American popular culture, constructing in time a sexual solid citizen and a perverted unstable alien, a sensual insider and a lascivious outlaw, a hetero center and a homo margin, a hetero majority and a homo minority. The new, strict boundaries made the new gendered, erotic world less polymorphous. The term heterosexual manufactured a new sex-differentiated ideal of the erotically correct, a norm that worked to affirm the superiority of men over women and heterosexuals over homosexuals.
Maybe we struggle to find only two sexual types (straight and gay) because we’re simple-minded and intellectually impatient. It’s the same reason we struggle to believe that there are only two genders (male and female) despite clear medical evidence to the contrary. This field is known as the study of “intersexuality.”
It is ironic that Senator Craig decided to be an important part of a well-coordinated effort to shove all people having same-sex sex (not just self-avowed homosexuals) into a demonized category so that they could be, well, demonized. He thus ended up in a trap that he himself helped to construct. For this, he gets no pity for me. He would have been a better candidate for redemption in my eyes had he stood up to confess “I am a hypocrite.” On the other hand, when Senator Craig claimed he was not “gay,” perhaps it was not as clear a lie as it is being made out to be by so many people.
I’ve learned yet another lesson as a result of Senator Craig’s exploits. He has reminded me to listen closely to all of those prominent politicians and religious leaders who go out of their way to antagonize gays (whether personally or through their legislative efforts). Craig is only the latest prominent example of Freud’s concept of the reaction formation, a defense mechanism in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions are replaced by their direct opposites. In fact, I am now convinced that of the 100 political and religious leaders who are the most vocal against “homosexuals,” half of them are struggling with their sexual identities and half of that half have actually had sex with people of the same gender. Perhaps Craig and the Reverend Ted Haggard could start a little 12-step program together and send invitations to everyone who spews venom against gays. They should send one of those invitations to every person of national prominence who surrounds himself with his wife and children while pretending that “homosexuality” is one of the biggest threats to our country. Those people who act like this are certainly not confident heterosexuals and their policy-making judgment will be warped by such inner struggles. Perhaps we should not this danger on billboards along national highways.
Craig’s arrest reminds me that those who protest the loudest, and they include oh-so-many fine upstanding married conservative God-fearing men, often have the most to hide. Perhaps they aren’t “homosexuals,” but the story of Craig makes you wonder how many of those conservative Republicans are busy having conflicted “non-homosexual” sex with other men.
After I wrote this post I noticed a detailed article describing the sort of conduct in which Larry Craig apparently engaged. It was written by a man who admits to being gay, and who claims to have first hand knowledge of various forms of public solicitation for commitment-free sex between consenting males. http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/08/31/bathr… Here's an excerpt:
Though the Idaho Statesman has cataloged a series of incidents that point to homosexual pickups dating back to 1967, he's sticking to the straight story, unlike Ted Haggard, who admitted partial guilt, confessed completely and then claimed to have been "cured" after three weeks of so-called reparative therapy. So unless we can get a full, graphic report on who was planning to do what to whom in that airport bathroom stall, the senator is free to believe that he is not gay, and has never been gay. Until then, we'll all be tapping our feet.
For more on the Republican hypocrisy over the matter, see Tom Tomorrow: http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2007/09/03/tomo/
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In the coming months, [blogger Mike Rogers] plans to post the names of "a few more" closeted Congress members on his blog, he says, all of them Republicans. There are 33 names on his published list, most of them men, 30 from the GOP. That fact reveals more about the Republicans, he says, than about him. Although a registered Democrat, he says he is bipartisan.
"I write about closeted people whose records are anti-gay," he says. "If you're a closeted Democrat or Republican and you don't bash gays or vote against gay rights to gain political points, I won't out you."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti…
What I don't understand is Craig's statement that he has "never been gay." I didn't know a person could be gay one day and straight the next. From what I understand, sexual preference is largely fixed in adolescence and doesn't significantly change later in life. What changes is a person's willingness to acknowledge his or her preference.
Of course, another interpretation of Craig's "I am not gay" statement is that he was excluding himself from the group of gay men who are *exclusively* homosexual. Craig is married and, thus, appears to be bisexual. Accordingly, he could arguably claim to be "not gay" without being untruthful.
Dec 21 2016
Here is another article about other “straight” men who have sex with other men:’
One more excerpt:
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/why-straight-rural-men-have-gay-bud-sex-with-each-other.html
Though what is described is claimed not to be “gay” sex, there are undeniable parallels, of course. Perhaps this explains why some heterosexual men are so disparaging of gays – it’s the reaction formation at work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_formation
Just read your “maybe he’s not gay” post about Larry Craig. It’s even more complicated than you depict. Kinsey established a seven-level continuum; five levels are some grade of bisexual. Only Kinsey three is pure bisexual, equal attraction to men and women. For example, in my late forties I realized I was a Kinsey Scale one. I’ve never acted on any attraction to males and am an enthusiastic fan of sex with women. I talked with my two adult daughters about it; both said it confirmed what they already guessed. I talked with my wife, who said I was wrong. Anyone not 100% straight is gay.
Were my wife to die, I suppose I might consider a male partner, but that’s unlikely. There is a six sigma probability that I will die before her. There are other behaviors in which some men engage with other men that are not gay. Tribes on both New Guinea and Tahiti encourage boys to fellate older boys and men because swallowing their semen will help make them strong warriors. Others engage in varied forms of sexual contact ranging from mutual masturbation to “brojobs.” These men assure me they are not gay, and prefer sex with women. During my truncated psychiatry residency I focused most on bipolar disorder (then called manic-depressive) because there was a subset with the disorder that benefited from talk therapy and a subset that didn’t. Eventually we identified the subset that benefited as Borderline Personality Disorder. I saw patients of various sexual preferences, but this was Germany in the 1980s and, frankly, almost no one cared.
In the early 1990s I used my established credibility with Defense Department decision-makers to present an overwhelming business case as well as constitutional case for allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military. First, it was costing an enormous amount of money and was mostly used to rid the services of good performers. Second, along with criminalizing homosexual behavior it criminalized homosexuality. The latter is criminalizing thought, clearly unconstitutional. That and the efforts of others led to Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Although maligned today, it was a necessary step in expanding the military’s capability to absorb change. When there was final acceptance in the military, its capability to absorb change was ready. Contrast with abortion on demand, legalized by judicial fiat and skipping public reasoned discussion and interim measures that would prepare society to accept abortion on demand. It remains a major division almost fifty years later.
I participate in two online fora, one dominated by progressives, one by right-wingers. The progressives tell me I’m an unthinking Trump supporter, a homophobe, xenophobe, bigot, racist, white supremacist and the list goes on. The right-wingers call me a communist. I support increased immigration once borders are secured. In addition to med school I did a masters in high-energy laser physics, so I understand the fatal flaw in anthropogenic global warning. Greenhouse gases can only reflect back into space an amount of energy equal to that received. We are nearly there already, and runaway global warming isn’t going to happen.The Oregon baker broke4 the law and should pay for it. The punishment was bankruptcy, corporate death penalty. How, then, do we punish refusal to provide medical services?
Pardon the soap-box. As I said, the topic is incredibly complex.