Sen. Larry Craig is a weird dude. I can’t relate. But it’s important to remember that Craig tried to weasel out his arrest.
After he was arrested, Craig, who is married, was taken to the Airport Police Operations Center to be interviewed about the lewd conduct incident, according to the police report. At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?” the report states.
Nice attempt to pull rank, dontcha think?
You can snigger about Craig’s sexual proclivities and hypocrisy…he deserves it. But the real crime here is that he was peeking through the stall at a guy that (for all he knew) was trying a take a crap. Then he went and sat on the next door toilet, stuck his foot into the other dude’s stall, and started playing footsie.
Somebody harasses me like that and I’m going to get upset.
Sen. Craig is a sick man and I feel a little sorry for him. He must have lived a very repressed life.
But the bottom line is that he’s a hypocrite. It’s now almost certain that he will retire.
Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?”
One of my favorite lines from a Steven Seagal movie is in Hard to Kill, when a corrupt politician yells as he is about to get busted: “You can’t do this to me! I’m a United States Senator!”
It’s only funny when it doesn’t work.
Somebody harasses me like that and I’m going to get upset.
I don’t think this is that far out of the range of ordinary gay male behavior. Based on the report you quoted, it looks like Craig guessed that the cop wasn’t really taking a crap. Now why would a man sit in a stall in a public lavatory if he’s not taking a crap? There aren’t that many possibilities.
Haven’t you ever had a gay man hit on you?
straight guy. Maybe after a 12 pack of beer….
How many times did I have to sit on a rest room to rol a joint? Tons…
Didn’t think of that. I only did that once, on a train in Britain, a long time ago…
Dude, ordinary people, gay or not, do not attempt to have sex with total strangers in nasty public lavatories. Believe it or not, most gay men are not that much different from straight men when it comes to an aversion to skeevy.
Hey, there are plenty of good looking guys that use lavatories at airports. That some men will have sex in public lavatories does not mean that they will have sex with anyone.
I think that what’s relevant here isn’t the difference between gay and straight, but between men and women. Lots of straight men would love to have casual sex with someone they don’t know, especially if she’s quite attractive, but unfortunately that’s only possible for rock stars and other high status males. Since gay men seek men and not women, it’s much easier for them to find willing partners for casual sex. That’s what explains the whole “cruising” phenomenon, including in public lavatories.
Just have a look at the Wikipedia entry on Gay cruising in the UK:
So Larry Craig’s behavior isn’t really that far out of the ordinary. For example, it can’t be compared to Mark Foley’s instant messaging of pages, in my opinion.
Craig’s arrest has been described by the Washington Post as the result of a sting operation. I have never seen men seeking or engaging in sex in a rest room, but my sense is that they seek it, at least, discretely, so it is probably rare for them to hit upon unwilling objects of desire. My guess would be that the main reason that the airport police received complaints is that straight men tend (understandably) not to like to hear men having sex with each other, especially while they are in the same room with them.
Men do not get pregnant. Two men having sex cannot result in a pregnancy. Remove that consideration and you make casual sex a much more inviting proposition. So, yes, men are more likely to go for casual sex than women, and two men are more likely to go for it than one man and one woman. But that does not translate into a willingness to proposition strangers in nasty, heavily trafficked public restrooms…and invade their privacy in doing so.
In a society where homosexuality is strictly taboo, you might see a lot of clandestine meet-up spots. They don’t have to involve urine and feces. And, in any case, homosexuality is no longer taboo. It’s only taboo in Craig’s circles, and that’s why you see him acting this way. I don’t consider public bathroom sex between strangers to be normal, no matter who engages in it.
You write as if there is no such thing as birth control. It’s generally accepted in evolutionary biology that men are programmed to be more ready to engage in sex than women because they need make no investment in the resulting child, whereas the woman generally has no choice but to raise it. Therefore, women have been selected to be much more choosy about their sexual partners than men are. This should not be controversial. It has nothing to do with a woman’s fear of getting pregnant, especially in the day of the morning after pill. (A woman’s higher chances of getting infected with HIV from a man than the other way around might be a more relevant concern.)
You say that you “don’t consider public bathroom sex between strangers to be normal, no matter who engages in it”. I am not aware that heterosexual sex in public bathrooms is a significant problem in our society. Personally, I don’t think that men hitting on each other without knowing anything about them (so that it cannot be clear that the other is gay) is perfectly normal either, but it happens.
Airport restrooms tend to be pretty clean. (You write about them as if they are gas station rest rooms in a horror movie.) Are you willing to say that gay bathhouses are not normal either? Because the main difference between public restrooms and gay bathhouses isn’t hygiene, but that gay sex is accepted by mainstream society in the latter but not the former.
I think that the two Wikipedia links I gave show that the kind of behavior we are discussing is part of gay culture taken broadly, and not something restricted to deviants and perverts. (Which doesn’t mean that society should tolerate it in public places: that’s up to each society to decide.) Therefore, I don’t think you can say that looking for sex in public restrooms is abnormal without saying that homosexuality itself is abnormal. And you can claim that finding it abnormal has nothing to do with it being gay and your being straight, on the grounds that you would be against it if straight people did it too, only by denying a finding well accepted in evolutionary biology, namely, that men are by nature more promiscuous than women.
Lesbians can’t make each other pregnant either, but police do not have to mount sting operations against their engaging in sex in ladies’ rooms. Analogously, Google gives 57,100 hits for “gay bathhouse”, and only 1480 for “lesbian bathhouse”.
that didn’t make any sense. I provided an evolutionary biology explanation and you acted like I didn’t.
This isn’t about promiscuity. This is about loitering in very public restrooms (not bathhouses). An airport, a train station. And looking into the stalls. And then, yes, when successful, engaging in sexual acts in mass transport restrooms.
You’ve just defined this as normal gay behavior and said to argue otherwise is to call gays abnormal in general.
Talk about begging the question!!!
There are a host of reasons why this is not normal for any group of people. As for hygiene, mass transit bathrooms are heavily trafficked and therefore they are generally not clean. You want clean, go to a nice restaurant or the public library or a department store.
OK. Like I said in my previous post, normalcy is a continuum. Society has to make a decision as to where to draw the line, and drawing it where you want to draw it is a good place to do it.
But there are plenty of things that are illegal and for which people get charged which lack a deep moral transgression, like drug use and/or dealing, prostitution, illegal gambling. This is one of those things. Personally, I think Craig’s hypocrisy is quite enough, so that one does not need to dwell on his “abnormality”. So long as there are public restrooms, gays will have sex in them on occasion. Just like prostitution will always be with us. (BTW, I believe that prostitution and recreational drugs should be legalized, but not sex in public restrooms. But then, I’m not gay. đŸ˜‰ )
As for the evolutionary biology angle, evolutionary biology is not like economics: it doesn’t suppose that people are “rational”. Women are designed to get pregnant, and by men with the best genes they can get. Therefore, they will on occasion engage in risky behavior if they are sufficiently attracted to someone. (They are designed to be predisposed to have sex with someone who is likely to have good genes, whereas men are predisposed to have sex with anyone, especially if she is fertile.)
When I was speaking of evolutionary biology applied to human sexuality, I was thinking of Donald Symons’ work. Here is what I got by Googling:
If you’re promiscuous and are able to realize your promiscuity, public restrooms are a valuable resource.
Yes, you are right, women are concerned with getting pregnant. But that that has little to do with why they are less promiscuous than men is shown by the fact that lesbians are not more promiscuous than heterosexual women.
your conclusions are just wrong.
Lesbians are still women. You seem to think they should be immune to evolutionary biology. They’re not. They have the same maternal drives of straight women. They have the same mating strategies.
Your conclusion does even refute my point. Concern with being pregnant isn’t a conscious thing…it’s built into the hardwiring of women. Their hardwiring tells them to get pregnant, to secure good genes for the baby, and, separately, to secure a male to help raise the baby. If they can’t satisfy the last requirement, then they are likely to be reticent about casual sex.
This is mitigated by birth control, obviously, but I’m not talking about conscious decision making, I’m talking about hardwiring through evolutionary biology.
If were to follow your argument, the desire to spread as much seed as possible would have nothing to do with casual sex in the gay male community because they are not consciously trying to procreate.
That’s an argument?
No, that’s not an argument.
And all of this is totally irrelevant. Gay or straight, it is not normal to loiter in public restrooms, peek into stalls, and have sex. This is especially true in well-trafficked restrooms.
In Philadelphia there is a restroom in one of the big downtown department stores that is known as a hook-up joint. But the fifth floor slacks department bathroom at Wannamaker’s is a little more private…ya know?
You brought up bathhouses earlier. Not only are bathhouses equipped with private rooms, they clean them up between visitors. They are not the equivalent of public restrooms.
I’m done with your line of argument. I think it’s offensive.
If were to follow your argument, the desire to spread as much seed as possible would have nothing to do with casual sex in the gay male community because they are not consciously trying to procreate.
That doesn’t follow from my argument at all, but as I said, I am not going to repeat myself.
I’m done with your line of argument. I think it’s offensive.
That’s what your whole argument comes down to: that you personally find some things offensive. Craig’s behavior is called vice. Vice is always going to be with us, so going on and on about how offensive it is is an activity better left to right-wingers.
Let me explain myself.
Maybe the people on the right are offended that Larry Craig engages in homosexual acts. I’m not. I’ve known about the rumors that he is gay for a long time and the only reason I cared was because of his voting record on gay rights. If this story involved some photos of Craig in bed with his boyfriend, or even some man he picked up at the airport, I would treat it as a strict hypocrisy story.
But this isn’t a strict hypocrisy story. This is about much more than that. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics committee because Craig’s behavior reflected ‘improper conduct which may reflect upon the Senate.’
Being gay has nothing to do with that complaint.
I agree of course that Craig’s conduct was improper, and it is perfectly legitimate for the Senate to punish him for it.
I found our exchanges interesting.
I guess that how I would sum up the matter is that trying to get sex in a public restroom is the gay equivalent of going to a hooker in a jurisdiction where prostitution is illegal. That is how it strike me, although I am not personally familiar with either subculture. And my sense is that that is how police view it, too.
Here’s how I sum it up. You are totally focused on the fact that Senator Craig wanted sex. I think that totally misses the point. Jerking off in a crowded movie theater is totally inappropriate and rightfully illegal. So is going into a restroom and peering over the shoulder of people while they urinate. So is peering into the stall while people are trying to take a crap. So is physically touching some from under the stall divider.
Somewhere in your head you’ve decided this is not out of the norm for gay men. I assure that you are wrong. It’s pretty offensive to suggest otherwise.
That’s my summary.
I just looked over at TPM, and there’s a front page post there of a reader’s letter saying that “The issue here is, why is the Minneapolis Airport PD arresting people for such flimsy reasons?” So I’m not the only one who has trouble getting all worked up about what’s in the arrest report. And many people posting in other places also don’t seem to be that bothered.
I really don’t think I have been saying anything offensive. I don’t know how the percentage of gays who go to public restrooms compares to the percentage of straight men who regularly use prostitute’s services. I imagine the two are pretty comparable. And I don’t think that anything Craig did or gays that get each other off in lavatories do is worse than a straight man going to a prostitute. And as I said, I don’t think that the incidence of the one behavior among gays is higher than the incidence of the other among straights. So I really don’t think I have denigrated gays in any way.
This might be out of the norm for gay men, but I am not sure that it is more out of the norm than going to hookers is out of the norm for straight men. Clearly, the arresting police officer had seen a lot of this type of behavior before he arrested Craig, and his report states that their department “has made numerous arrests regarding sexual activity in the public restroom.” That suggests that even if this activity is outside of the norm, the norm does get broken with some regularity.
Finally, it is not just I that am “totally focused on the fact that Senator Craig wanted sex”, but also the criminal justice system, since the cop made the arrest only after he thought that Craig had done enough to make it clear that he was soliciting.sex. And for what its worth, the interference with privacy charge was dismissed, for whatever reason.
Jesus.
This is really hard to understand?
We seem to be at cross-purposes. The complaints were (1) “regarding sexual activity“, whereas in your previous post you wrote that I “totally miss the point” that the main problem isn’t Craig’s wanting sex, but interference with privacy (complaints about which were not mentioned in the arrest report); and (2) were unlikely to have been about Craig specifically, unless he’s made an awful lot of visits to that restroom.
Of course Larry Craig had visited that rest room before. Everytime he flies from DC to Idaho he has a layover in that terminal. I assume it is the Northwest airline he uses.
People were complaining about sexual activity in that restroom that Craig was surely well aware was occurring. Hell…he was one of the people engaging in it.
So, why did the police put on a sting? Because they were getting complaints. The complaints aren’t itemized, so we don’t know whether people complained about being propositioned or peeped upon, or just about actual sexual activity.
Is there any question that the airport police have an obligation to clean that kind of activity out of the airport restrooms when they receive complaints?
Why would anybody call that frivolous?
Now think about this for a minute. No one travels by air just so they can use a terminal rest room known for sexual activity. I doubt the restroom was even available to non-ticket holders…although I could be wrong about that.
If this was a recurring problem it must have been a limited number of frequent travelers that knew about it…including Craig.
If you knew where to look you could probably even find references to it online.
It was prevalent enough that it caused multiple complaints. I can’t see why anyone thinks this investigation and arrest weren’t justified.
Well, I guess extreme civil liberties types aren’t altogether extinct. That’s a good thing, because it helps to have points of view expressed to the left of where you are. That helps to keep the boundaries of progressive discourse acceptable to the mainstream from receding.
I never thought there was anything wrong with the sting. The cops are just doing what they’re supposed to do. And I think the cop was proceeding in a fairly restrained fashion, since he could have put off the arrest to have Craig compromise himself further.
It’s funny that you note that Craig must have visited that rest room before. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would visit his state often, and then take the same route when doing so.
I can’t believe that he is still issuing explicit denials that he is not gay. He’s pretty old; he’s just continuing in his old habits on that score. The article in the Idaho Statesman mentions that they could find one college girl friend of about a year, and she said that they never so much as held hands! And Craig claims that there was another, more serious, girl friend, but no one can find her because he won’t give out her name. I can’t believe he is trying to go on with this fiction when no one can find a significant woman in his life other than his wife, with whom he has not had any children. He even says things like, “I have never hit on any men.” He never bothers to add, “or women for that matter”!
Given all that, I don’t think that anyone, left or right, thinks that his denials on this score are credible. Personally, I’d like to see him run again, but he will probably be talked out of it.
I was going to stay out of this, but this:
Concern with being pregnant isn’t a conscious thing…it’s built into the hardwiring of women. Their hardwiring tells them to get pregnant, to secure good genes for the baby, and, separately, to secure a male to help raise the baby. If they can’t satisfy the last requirement, then they are likely to be reticent about casual sex.
That’s hardly “fact”. You’re making a sociobiological argument that is simply, well, not very valid. Sorry. If we are hardwired for stuff, it’s all incredibly complicated by the social. Plenty of women are extremely into casual sex without “securing a male to help raise the baby” — and the “spread the genes far and wide as much and frequently as possible” mating strategy is not the strategy humans use, to put it simply. We have extremely vulnerable (frankly completely helpless, in animal terms) offspring, and that’s probably a portion of why we’ve developed complex social structures — but even that’s largely guesswork.
Real, valid, rigorous evolutionary biology does not generally go there, and with extremely good reason.
Aside from that, hello, haven’t seen you in a while.
I’m simplifying for brevity.
Men have paternal instincts and love is a pretty strong chemical component. Moreover, the success of hardwiring may vary. In the most obvious cases, people may lack any sex drive or lack a sex drive for the opposite sex. In less obvious cases, people may lack maternal or paternal drives entirely. People may utterly lack impulse control, overriding prudential messages. People obviously act differently when they have access to reliable birth control and legal abortion. Religious, social, legal, and familial influences can and do override hardwiring.
Yet, in general, men are more inclined to engage in casual sex than women…regardless of culture or other social influences. Also, in general, gay men act like straight men and lesbians act like straight women, when it comes to making choices about sex, and life partners.
There are a lot of reasons, for example, why it is safer for a woman to have sex with another woman than with a man. There’s less chance of violence, there’s no chance of pregnancy. And, yet, this does not lead lesbians to be more promiscuous than straight women.
Gay men have more partners than straight men, but that is most likely the result of a host of factors not related to hardwiring.
Some that come to mind: society does not expect gay men to be married, have kids…and actively discourages it. Female reticence, family obligations, and social taboos are significant drags on male promiscuity…straight men would like to have more partners than they do, but either lack opportunity or weigh other things more heavily.
My argument here is that it is not a normal feature of gay men to be so promiscuous that they can’t help propositioning strangers in public restrooms, as Alexander repeatedly alleged. They are hardwired as men, and act like men.
Alexander argued that (lack of) consideration of childrearing cannot explain increased partnership in gay men because it doesn’t have that effect on lesbians. That was a non sequitur. I never argued that lesbians would adopt male mating strategies. I argued that a) gay men basically act like regular men, but b) when you remove potential childrearing considerations you make casual sex more enticing. I did not argue that this was the only consideration here. I have mentioned others above.
At its most basic level, people need incentives not to have sex, or to remain monogamous. The higher potential cost of engaging in sex, the more likely it is that one will opt not to have it. Those incentives are calibrated by both hardwiring and social mores…and even social policy.
But in no circumstance and among no group is it normal to act as Larry Craig acted.
As I pointed out elsewhere, where there are strong taboos against homosexuality, it will be forced underground. But there’s no reason that it should be forced into public lavatories…
And it’s a stretch to even debate this on those terms, because what got Craig did was about more than having sex in a bathroom. It was about invading innocent people’s privacy.
The pregnancy issue would seem to be a non-starter as it relates to casual sex. More likely it has to do with a couple of things: women, even women like me who are middle-aged and oh-so-not-hot can engage in sex any time they want, just because of the laws of supply and demand and they don’t need to resort to bathroom hookups. And #2….women are much less likely to engage in casual, spur of the moment sex because as a woman you learn to avoid danger and strange men are dangerous.
Hey! I’m a strange man and I assure you I am completely safe!
(if you don’t count the firearms, blades, and assorted other hardware….)
Straight Society has told gay men that they will never find love or a mate. A long-term relationship is out of the question.
When straight people remove commitment, frequent, casual sex is what you get.
If women were more willing to copulate, many straight guys would be cruising parks for a quickie.
Martin maybe you arent aware that certain bathrooms are known to be cruisey. I can think of 3 off the top of my head that are famous for it.
Airports are notorious for this kind of thing.
More than likely it was not the first time he had been to that spot.
hey boo- the real crime was that he peaked at somebody taking a shit? What the hell are you talking about. The real crime is that this son of a bitch lives in a society that forces people to behave in such a surrepitious manner that they lose all perspective. And he supports that society!
However, when somebody denies that what he is and assumes a leadership role based on his assumed strong negative position against the behavior that controls his life as well as thousands of others, he deserves absolutely no sympathy! None!.
How many lives has his positions on anti gay laws ruined. How many fellow Americans have died because this sick bastard has voted against the kinds of programs that might just discover the cures for illnesses that plague our society?
Feel sorry for him? Not a fucking chance. He got busted and it appears from the report that he tried to use his senate role to get away with his crime.
Hey Boo- how sorry would you feel for him if the person in the other stall was a 14 year old young man?
Sorry?
The thing on the news tonight had him claiming that he only plead guilty to make the thing go away quietly – I guess in the hope that it would never hit the news.
Now that the whole world knows about it he now claims it was a mistake to copy a guilty plea. Looks like he might try and go down fighting – at least for a while..
It takes a while for the new situation to sink in.
There is a pattern. From BlogActive: from last October:
It’s quite possible he was busted in D.C. too, but was able to wheedle his way out there.
The Wikipedia article on him notes that his three children are adopted: they are his wife’s. (The newspaper stories don’t mention that.) Obviously a marriage of convenience. If he’s helped her raise her three children, I’m sure she doesn’t care what he does in public lavatories.
Today from BlogActive:
Yea, right. Funny thing is, in Massachusetts, you can be openly gay and win election after election, if you’re a Dem, at least.
How do you ascertain what a person is doing in the bathroom stall without illegally invading their privacy… I suggest that gay men find a better way to pick up guys than ever try and stare into my stall ’cause I’d kick the stall door into their face. Not because they are gay, I could care less about that… But because I have a right to privacy. And unless I have clearly heard them ask me to pass them some TP because their stall is out, I am crushing their hand if It comes under the partition because I am thinking about the wallet in my pants down there on the floor around my ankles.
Anyways:
I don’t like to take craps in public toilets because, to be frank, there is no way to do so privately. So I think the invasion of privacy issue is a bit of a red herring. I wouldn’t want to have someone playing footsie with me when I am on the toilet either, but I know of no one whom that’s happened to (whereas I have heard of other straight men getting hit on under other circumstances, and it has happened to me as well). Like I said in a post above, I think the reason that the police try to keep this behavior under control isn’t that people’s privacy is getting invaded directly, but that they are forced to have to put up with listening to men having sex with each other.
I agree absolutely that the main problem here is hypocrisy, of a staggering level, in my opinion. But then it has always been hard for me to get inside the mind of a Republican.
Forget the footsie:
So, you’re in there filling up your condoms with some of the best Pakistani skag money can buy, and suddenly some dude is peeking in the stall at you?
And you think that’s a red herring? That’s the main issue. A secondary issue is the fact that he’s been using these lavatories for years. You want sit down to take a crap and see two sets of shoes in the stall next to you? No one wants to deal with that shit.
Then the bastard tries to pull rank on the cop.
This isn’t normal behavior.
Part of the problem here is that there’s a continuum of normalcy. I guess I’ve been influenced here by the movie Taxi zum Klo which I saw in the 1980s, which was set in the pre-AIDS period. That movie showed me that there is a subculture for which having sex in public lavatories is normal. I’m by no means a post-modernist or anything like that, but in this case I do think it’s largely about “social construction”. All that I’m saying is that if John Gielgud did it, it can’t be completely beyond the pale.
I’m by no means defending the guy. I don’t have any problem with the cops running the sting and his getting arrested and charged. I just don’t think it’s as black and white as you’ve been making it out to be.
I certainly don’t want to have two pairs of shoes next to my stall in the rest room: I’ve said as much. But my sense is precisely that that kind of thing is more what makes this a “social problem” than having people look into your stall. (And like I also said, I never feel that I have sufficient privacy in a stall, if there is someone else in the rest room.)
Yes, Craig looked through the stall crack etc., but this was a sting. We don’t know if the cop didn’t do something to make Craig think he was interested, so I am not convinced that Craig would have done the same thing to you or me if we walked into that rest room. Police women who do stings against Johns dress and act like whores. Why should it be any different with this kind of sting?
Trying to pull rank on the cop comes with the territory of being a gay Republican gay-basher.
“So I think the invasion of privacy issue is a bit of a red herring.”
Staring into someone’s stall between cracks around the door, or from anywhere else for that matter, is not a red herring, it is an illegal invasion of a person’s privacy.
hey boo- ya know that ” feeling sorry…” for the good senator?
How about this. Try google: 1982 craig scandal cocaine pages–
or– how about TPM! The good senator might just ahve been involved with that other piece of resigned garbage. Yeah- we all should feel sorry for him.
These gooper assholes- my god.
ya see, I don’t care who they diddle- I do care that they try to cover the guilt by fucking over members of the gay community in the hopes of covering their asses.
Remember Boo- 1982.
Color me dumber than a stick. . .I just watched something in the last month on our local PBS or local news about Larry and they were asking him how it was to be an UNmarried Senitor. . .something that only folks in Idaho would ask, like it is a disease or something.
So is he or isn’t he. Now I don’t know for sure.
I heard he’s married and his wife has three adopted kids (I guess he married them too). But I also here that she lives in Chicago and he lives in Idaho and somewhere around DC. Don’t know if this is correct, but his congressional profile confirms that he is married and his wife is named Suzanne.
Thanks Boo, sounds like he has one of those “convenient” marriages. There used to be a lot of them back in the old days. . .
Yup…sure sounds that way.
His wife is deceased, no?