"I Found My Thrill on Blueberry Hill..."
After reading Oso Raro's comments on Senator Craig's arrest, I feel more comfortable writing my own. It's easy to feel alone in your thoughts if you start to wonder whether the mainstream media actually does represent what people think. If any adult has a consensual sexual relationship with another adult outside of marriage or a committed relationship, I don't really care. I've just know that we never get the full story, so any judgment rings false. Maybe they had an open relationship. Maybe they have been on the brink of divorce for years. Maybe they truly did something wrong. I never know enough to decide. Then there's the hypocrisy angle. Sure, I'm all for exposing hypocrisy. I've rarely had a problem with outing in such instances (though that's a topic too large for this post).

But this case has bugged me from the start, and it does so because of the long, disturbed relationship between law enforcement and gay male sexuality. For me, it goes back to college. I had a friend, and I really do mean a friend. I'm not talking about myself; such things are a matter of public record so anyone can search police records from Houston in the early 1990s and see that I'm not talking about myself. But I had a friend who was arrested. He was in a park bathroom, standing at a urinal. A man stood next to him clearly not urinating. My friend finished and stood there. The other man had his penis out, as did my friend since he had just finished going to the bathroom.

As my friend stood there and smiled at the man, that man turned, zipped up, and arrested him. Now, the official police report left out these details. Yes, I trust my friend's version of the events. My friend freaked. He had never done anything sexual in a public place, restricting his activities to private places. But the man was cute, and my friend was happy to have such an attractive man's attention. The arrest embarrassed and terrified him. He pled guilty and took a plea bargion of probation that required that he meet with a sex offenders support group weekly. On Tuesday afternoons, he sat in a circle with a group of men who had been found guilty of child molestation and sexual assault. The men resented him being there, but he had to do it or go to jail. These meetings were in addition to those with his probation officer.

Neither my friend nor I had ever heard of entrapment. The police were not to be questioned. The legal system was not to be challenged. Something went wrong, but none of us knew what to do about it.

Since then, I've heard other stories of similar incidents, some clear cases of entrapment and some clear cases of overreaction to men being with men. I originally wrote "men having sex with men," but then I remember that infamous case from the mid-1990s when two men were arrested after being caught holding hands in a parked car. It seems the mother of one of the men had just died, and the other was comforting his friend. Fully clothed. But men were touching. And that deserves punishment.

Everytime I read something about Senator Craig, I sigh. I don't want to feel sympathy for him specifically. But the pattern disturbs me. The details that I've heard before disturb me. I'm not saying sex in such venues should be allowed, but as Oso Raro asks, does the punishment fit the crime? Do lives need to be ruined for things like this? I haven't read the Minnesota statutes, but I want to know how sticking a hand under a stall is lewd conduct. How is that defined? Is reaching for toilet paper lewd? What exactly did this man do and why does it deserve the punishments he's receiving, both inside and outside the law?

In cases like this, I return to an image that haunts me. In numerous episodes of Happy Days, Richie Cunningham--the quintessential good boy--walks into his house singing Fats Domino: "I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill." It's a song like a lot of songs from the 50s and 60s that use euphemisms for sex. "Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme gravy tonight," as one other example. Richie sings a song that alludes to sex with a woman outside, in public. It brings to mind images of teens in cars "making out." It's cute. It's all-American. It's a rite of passage. But if two men do it, it's a different story.

To say the least.
- posted by Nels @ 7:33 PM | | | Link |