A Code I Never Had To Learn…
…and Thank You God for it. This from David Ehrenstein…
Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest shows that ‘Tearoom Trade’ is alive and well despite the progress of gay rights.
On June 28, 1969, when New York’s far-from-fashionable Stonewall Inn was raided, the patrons responded by fighting the cops. Although gays and lesbians had resisted before (often right here in Los Angeles), this Manhattan uprising served to jump-start the modern phase of the gay rights movement.
That movement, with its defiant insistence on being free to be as gay as all-get-out, quickly left the likes of Walter Jenkins and, if the cops were right, Larry Craig in the dust. They’re part of a subculture within a subculture that was memorably identified by the daring sociologist Laud Humphreys in a landmark sociological study titled "Tearoom Trade."
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Published in 1970, "Tearoom Trade" is full of useful information about foot tapping, shoe touching, hand signaling and all the other rituals those so inclined use to make contact with one another in such places. Clearly no media outlet should be without a copy — especially Slate.com, whose editors revealed their cluelessness on the subject this week in a "real time conversation" rife with unintentional hilarity: "I can’t believe it’s a crime to tap your foot." "Can someone explain the mechanics of how two people are supposed to commit a sex act in a stall where legs are visible from the knee down?"
I have no idea either…and if you’re gay and you don’t either, then spare a moment of quiet thanks to all the street kids and drag queens who fought back at the Stonewall Inn that day in June 1969 (and now you know, in case you didn’t before, why Gay Pride Day (or Pride Week depending on where you live) usually falls in late June…).
It’s not making excuses for the likes of Larry Craig, to say that the behavior is understandable nonetheless. Ehrenstein is absolutely right about this:
…in the age of Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, "Brokeback Mountain" and the smooching gay teens on "As the World Turns," bathroom cruisers seem almost antique. Today’s gays want to get married, and an airport men’s room is no place to propose.
Moreover, if what you’re "proposing" falls well short of marriage, there’s always the Internet. Larry Craig, meet Craigslist. In short, never has the admonition "Get a room!" seemed more apropos. It’s up to the I’m-not-gay(s) to discover the real freedoms fought for and won by the people they so fiercely claim they’re not.
I know what a lot of you guys were taught about homosexuals…I was taught a lot of that crap too. It’s bullshit. There is nothing wrong with you. You don’t have to keep flushing your heart down the toilet. The people you’re trying to appease by denying yourself, hate you anyway.
That stain you feel on your soul…it’s not yours. It’s theirs…the haters, the ignorant, the arrogant. They want you to think it’s a stain on you, they want you to feel unclean, every moment of every day. Because they hate you. They want you to consign your soul to the sewer, so they won’t have to look at the sewer they’ve made of their own souls.
You need to leave the toilet. Leave it to the purpose it was made for. The joy of sex does not belong there. Sex is wonderful. Sex is awesome. It is one of this life’s perfect joys. Get up. Walk over to the sink. Look in the mirror and say "I Am A Homosexual." You don’t have to say it with a flourish of pride, you just have to look yourself in the eye and say it. Then wash your hands. Wash them like you’re washing off every filthy lie about homosexuals you ever heard. Make yourself clean again. Because you Are clean. There is nothing wrong with you. There was never anything wrong with you.
Then walk out of there. Don’t look back.
