Well you had to know this was coming.  ABC News, the network that whitewashed the murder of Matthew Shepard, smearing a murdered gay kid as a meth addict who probably had sex with at least one of his killers, ABC News now tells us that the problem with Larry Craig isn’t so much that he was cruising for sex in toilets all the while promoting himself as a Family Values man, but that he was gay…and That’s What Gays Do…

Secret Signals: How Gay Men Cruise for Sex
When Men Cruise for Sex in Public Places, Police Take Notice and Gays Say It’s Unfair

Dig the headlines here.  It’s the 1950s all over again as far as how ABC views the gay community.  We’re all sex crazed perverts sulking around public toilets…

Public places like men’s restrooms, in airports and train stations, truck stops, university libraries and parks, have long been places where gay and bisexual men, particularly those in the closet, congregate in order to meet for anonymous sex.

Over time, people familiar with cruising told ABCNEWS.com, gay men began using a codified system of signals to indicate to others that they were interested in sex. In an effort to curb lewd acts in public — or as some gays argue, in an effort to persecute gay men — undercover police began sting operations in places known for sex soliciting and employed the same codes.

You have to read to the very end of the article before you get to this, sorta-kinda acknowledgment that this is a behavior characteristic more of the closet, then of gay people as a whole…

With many other options available for gay men to meet each other, Gershen Kaufman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Michigan State University and author of the book "Coming Out of Shame," said public cruising is practiced mainly by deeply closeted men.

"Cruisers are not sex offenders. They are deeply, deeply closeted. There is a lot of self-hatred and shame and they can’t allow themselves to come to terms with their sexuality.

The fact is that anonymous cruising areas are an artifact of the persecution gay people faced daily before Stonewall, when gay bars were routinely raided by the police, their customers rounded up like cattle and herded into paddy wagons, their names and addresses printed in the newspapers the following day.  Back in those days you could loose your job, the roof over your head, be expelled from college or dismissed from a jobs program, be denied or have a professional license revoked, and be put on a sex offenders registry and be required to report any change of residence to the police…simply for being gay.  This is why back then, many gay people gravitated to places where they could have sex anonymously: because being identified as a homosexual could have devastating consequences.  Anonymous sex was seen as a safe outlet. 

Back in the 50s, heterosexual sexuality had to conform to the nuclear family ideal, and gay sexuality was forced by fear and prejudice into a pattern of brief barren encounters.  When the sexual revolution came along, heterosexuals broke free of the stifling conformity of the 50s, and felt free to explore their sexuality and find their own places of sexual joy and fulfillment on their own terms.  I think a lot of gay people, seeing heterosexuals suddenly discovering the joys of sex for its own sake, mistook the culture of anonymous sex they’d been forced into for generations for a kind of liberation too.  Well look at us…we were sexual pioneers all along and we didn’t even know it…  No…we were outcasts, driven into the gutter by prejudice and hate. 

While it may have seemed superficially back in the brutal 1950s that gays were having sex for its own sake, the fact was that we were a people whose sexuality was being brutally stifled.  Gay people had sex in back alleys and parks and toilets back then, not because we were sexual pioneers way before the swinging 60s, but because the sex drive isn’t something that you can stifle in a mammal, let alone a primate, let alone a human being, for very long.  It had to come out somewhere, and if that wasn’t in the normal human course of dating and mating, then it was going to be in quick, desperate assignations, because an instinct older then the fish was going to drive us, some how, some way, toward some sort of sexual joining, no matter how much fear and self loathing the culture managed to cram into our heads…and our hearts.

Sexual freedom was good for heterosexuals, and it was good for us too.  But I think, especially in the years right after Stonewall, that a lot of gay people mistook the tea rooms for a liberation that we already had.  No.  It was repression.  We are not a free people, if anonymous random hooking up is the only choice we are allowed.  I get…trust me I get the fact…that there are gay people who feel that cruising for anonymous sex is liberation and getting married and settling down is a kind of sexual selling out.  It’s bullshit.  Anonymous sex is fine, whether you’re gay or straight, if that’s your sexual temperament.  Not everyone is emotionally equipped for relationships, let alone monogamy.  Fine.  What was good about the sexual revolution, was that it gave our bodies and our libidos back to us.  As long as people are decent to one another, to paraphrase Jefferson, it neither picks my pockets nor breaks my legs if the sex they’re having is not the sort of sex I would want to have myself.  But we’re not all into that by any means, and if sexual freedom for heterosexuals meant that they could have all the casual sex they want, then it has to also mean that gay people can do the dating and mating thing if that’s what they want.

And that’s what’s been happening for the past couple decades, although you’d never know it to listen to ABC News.  Gay couples have in a sense, and literally, been moving into the suburbs.  They’ve been getting married.  They’ve been settling down.  Gay kids are playing the dating and mating game now, just like their heterosexual peers.  Gay neighborhoods have coffee shops, grocery stores, boutiques, same sex couples walking their dogs, chatting about the weather, bellyaching about taxes and city services.  The cruising zones have given way to online dating services.

I can see, in a really perverse way, how some gay men might think that holding on to toilet stall sex amounts to preserving some kind of gay cultural legacy.  But it’s a legacy of repression and persecution, the verdict of bigots, not merely on our sexuality, but on our very hearts and souls.  Homosexuals are filth…  No.  We are human beings.   The men having toilet stall sex these days are almost exclusively deeply closeted people who are full of the fear and self loathing nearly everyone had back before Stonewall…back before Hooker’s study, and the APA removing homosexuality from its list of mental diseases…back when we almost all believed that we were sick, like everyone said we were…back when we hated ourselves. 

"If only we didn’t hate ourselves so much…if only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…"
-Michael, The Boys In The Band

The fact that this kind of thing is still going on is proof that as far as we’ve come as a people, we still have a long way to go before we’re truly free.  And if the likes of the republican party and their mouthpieces like ABC News have their way of course, we never will be.  The problem wasn’t that we hated ourselves.  The problem was never that we hated ourselves.  To hate yourself is not the human condition.  We were taught to hate ourselves.  Because so many others hated us, and could never endure seeing us happy, contented, proud, and least of all…loved.  What ABC News is trying to do here, is rekindle that hatred.  So the day can come again when we can be taught to hate ourselves once more.  So that one day we may once again come to believe that our sexuality, that our love lives, that we, belong in the sewer.