Idaho-mo

[Damien]

From Wonkette:

LARRY CRAIG SEX EXCLUSIVE! "I HAD SEX WITH LARRY CRAIG!"

We’ve been having loads of fun with gay restroom goblin Larry Craig over the past couple of months, haven’t we? What we’ve been missing, though, is an on-the-record account from a source willing to come forward and tell what it’s like to have an actual romantic liaison with the Idaho Republican. Meet David Phillips, a local IT geek and bear-about-town.

Phillips was recently in a bar minding his own business when he heard Craig’s voice on the television. “I went pale and nearly vomited,” Phillips says. It was the man he remembered from one of his creepiest sexual encounters twenty years earlier. “After a truncated meal I went back to my hotel room and began unwinding and jotting down the memories that the voice had opened. I recalled The Follies, the furtive groping and pawing there, the odd following of this man in my car….. Crap!”

Phillips’ embarrassing, Santorum-laced tale follows:

It was late in the Spring of 1987, and Phillips was a graduate student at George Mason University. “One of my favorite hangouts was The Follies,” Phillips explains, referring to the notorious and now-closed go-go boy bar La Cage aux Follies on Capitol Hill. “There were so many closeted neocons who trolled for cock and ass there, particularly cock and ass on younger men: Terry Dolan, Jon Hinson, and a bunch of other men who seemed to run in a close and secretive group. I had sex with some of them at The Follies, and I even went home with a couple of them — at different times, at least — based on smooth talk and their attraction to a 20-something geek. One of them I would later recognize as Larry Craig.”

One night, Phillips continues, “I followed [Craig] from The Follies to a Capitol Hill neighborhood, parking on the street no telling how far from his house. We walked up the alley and through the back door of a house, with him repeating several times, ‘You were never here. You don’t know me. Right?’ and me responding, ‘Right!’ in boyish submission. As we tiptoed from the back door to the stairs to the upper floor, as if somebody else was home, he turned to grope my crotch and brush my face with his hand.” The house’s decor led Phillips to believe that this was a married man: “The bric-a-brac with family pictures didn’t scream ‘old queen’ to me; it announced a woman’s influence. Still, we made our way upstairs.

“When we got to what reminded me of a rarely used guest room, he stripped me down, and the man’s hands and mouth were all over me. He kept his pants on, though, while laying me back on the bed to suck my cock. Then, he stripped naked and asked me to suck him. I complied for a while, then he disappeared and returned with lube and a condom to fuck me me with. It was a clumsy and unremarkable fuck, except that I wasn’t clean and he was frantic about not getting my shit on anything. Still, he blew his load, ripped the dirty condom off and ordered me to get dressed without wiping myself. He hurried me to the back door, again ranting, ‘You were never here. You don’t know me. Right?’”

Mr. Phillips’ next claim is startling, indeed: “On the way back through with shit all in my briefs and feeling totally humiliated I let my eyes wander and saw on a table a small envelope, like one from a gift or a floral arrangement, with ‘Suzanne Craig’ neatly written on it. This memory,” Phillips insists, “I noted about three hours after hearing Craig’s voice again, the night before I saw a current picture of him and a good day before I heard of his wife in the news. ‘That’s who’s going to fuck me up if she finds out,’ I thought. As he reached for the door, he took a $20 bill from his wallet, shoved in my front pocket, adding ‘Remember, I can buy and sell your ass ten thousand times over. You were never here. Don’t try to come back here. You don’t know me.

“When I next heard that voice two months ago,” David concludes, “my mind went right back to that encounter, leaving me feeling cold and used all over again. I wish I hadn’t been a screwed-up kid at the time and had had the presence of mind to tell him to keep the money he shoved at me like I was part of the trade common to The Follies.”

And why has Mr. Phillips decided to share this story with us? Mostly because I badgered him to after he related the story to me two weeks ago at the DC Eagle (I’ve known David for several years). “I’m just glad to purge some mental baggage over it. I wouldn’t ratchet my current feelings about it to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder levels,” he explains, “but it’s close. Changing jobs, celebrating two years off meds, and dealing with carpal tunnel release surgery have actually helped me keep sane during the last few weeks. I keep thinking, ‘What next?’ There were a bunch of Houston oil execs and financiers I tricked with during college, almost all of whom were married… so I’ve been on-edge during both Bush presidencies, waiting for one of them to rise to Cabinet level.”

—Princess Sparkle Pony

[Damien]

I saw a little of his interview with Matt Lauer. This guy is as gay as Franklin Pangborn.

[Akash]

At most, Craig was guilty of tapping his foot, waving his hand and touching the shoe of a policeman in a nonviolent manner.

If this is the best "come hither" Republican gays can come up with, I'm surprised they're having any sex at all.

[Damien]

Reactionary Republicans and the Catholic Church. Brothers Under The Skin:

SUSPENDDED VATICAN OFFICIAL INSISTS HE WAS ONLY PRETENDING TO BE GAY WHEN SECRETLY FILMED

DATELINE: VATICAN CITY

(Associated Press)

A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man said in an interview published Sunday that he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.

In an interview with La Repubblica newspaper, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico said he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."

Vatican teaching holds that homosexual activity is a sin.

"It's all false; it was a trap. I was a victim of my own attempts to contribute to cleaning up the Church with my psychoanalyst work," La Repubblica quoted Stenico as saying.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said Saturday that the monsignor had been suspended pending a Vatican investigation. Stenico is a top official in the Vatican's Congregation of the Clergy.

The Vatican after acted Vatican officials recognized Stenico's office in the background of a television program on gay priests that was broadcast on Oct. 1 on La7, a private Italian TV network. Stenico was secretly filmed making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful.

In the Repubblica interview, Stenico said he had met with the young man and pretended to talk about homosexuality "to better understand this mysterious and faraway world which, by the fault of a few people among them some priests is doing so much harm to the Church."

He said he had never been gay and was heterosexual, but remained faithful to his vow of celibacy.

Italy's Sky TG24 said Stenico had written a letter to his superiors with a similar defense.

Calls to Stenico's home and Vatican office went unanswered Sunday.



Edited By Damien on 1192384348

[OscarGuy]

New Bumper Sticker:

I was Guilty before I was Not Guilty.

[Eric]

I follow the logic, but resist the conclusion.

[Sonic Youth]

Couldn't have said it better.

The truth might sting a little
By: Roger Simon
Politico.com
September 6, 2007 06:35 AM EST

Larry Craig should not resign from the Senate.

He should force the Senate to expel him, which the Constitution provides for, but which the Senate has not done to any of its members since 1862.

If he can, Craig also should withdraw his guilty plea to what police say was “lewd conduct” in a public restroom at Minneapolis airport in June.

I have no doubt that Craig, an Idaho Republican, did what a cop says he did.

But I have a big doubt as to whether any of it was a crime. And I think a jury would have a reasonable doubt that he is guilty as charged.

Larry Craig committed a lewd act in that restroom? Larry Craig committed disorderly conduct in that restroom?

Let the prosecutors prove it in court.

Just because Craig is a jerk doesn’t mean he shouldn’t get civil rights in this country.

Cops have been busting gay men for decades without any legal basis. It is scandalous that the practice is still going on.

Do law enforcement officers in Minneapolis have nothing better to do? How about checking the bridges for cracks? Think that might be a better use of manpower?

Sting operations and “disorderly conduct” charges are not designed to get convictions. They are designed to give the police the ability to “roust” people, move them along and satisfy citizen complaints.

The people who get charged are almost always too embarrassed or frightened to fight the charges in court.

Let me stipulate that sex in public restrooms fails the yuck test for any number of reasons.

I don’t like going into public restrooms even for the purposes for which they were intended. And I cannot imagine people having sex in them.

Let me also stipulate that children have to use these restrooms, too, and they should not have to hear or see anybody using restrooms for sex.

And if Larry Craig had assaulted anybody in that restroom, or initiated sex with a child, I would be the first to say Craig should be arrested, charged, convicted and sent away.

But Craig didn’t do that. At most, Craig was guilty of tapping his foot, waving his hand and touching the shoe of a policeman in a nonviolent manner.

I don’t think prosecutors will be able to find a jury that would convict Craig of those “crimes.”

And neither does Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who is not only the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but, more importantly, a former district attorney from Philadelphia. So Specter knows a thing or two about what it takes to get a conviction from a jury.

And Specter said Sunday that if Craig went to trial, “he wouldn’t be convicted of anything.”

On Saturday, Craig said he intended to resign from the Senate at the end of this month. Immediately, some of his fellow Republicans began bragging that they had forced him out and that this showed that their party was still the party of “family values.”

But on Tuesday, Craig’s spokesman said Craig might not resign.

And why should he? The Senate wants him out to prove what an upstanding body it is? Let the Senate kick him out. Let his fellow senators put up or shut up.

Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution provides that “Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two-thirds, expel a Member.”

According to the Senate website: “Since 1789, the Senate has expelled only 15 of its entire membership.

Of that number, 14 were charged with support of the Confederacy during the Civil War.”

The non-Civil War expulsion was that of William Blount of Tennessee, a Democratic Republican, who was expelled in 1797 for “a plan to incite the Creek and Cherokee Indians to aid the British in conquering the Spanish territory of West Florida.”

Larry Craig is no William Blount.

Larry Craig is a hypocrite, a liar and a fool.

But if we kicked people out of the Senate for that, how many senators would we have left?

[OscarGuy]

What a farkin' idiot.

I guess the copy of the article Sonic posted didn't come through with my Farkin' Idiot post, which is why I posted it in the first place, so please attach that comment where it appropriately belongs...following his "maybe I'm not resigning" article.

[Sonic Youth]

Maybe he's not resigning after all.

Good.

[OscarGuy]

What a farkin' idiot.

[Penelope]

From the NY Times:

America’s Toe-Tapping Menace

By LAURA M. Mac DONALD

WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.

In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.

That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.

Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”

Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.

Mr. Humphreys broke down these transactions into phases, which are remarkably similar to the description of Senator Craig’s behavior given by the police. First is the approach: Mr. Craig allegedly peeks into the stall. Then comes positioning: he takes the stall next to the policeman. Signaling: Senator Craig allegedly taps his foot and touches it to the officer’s shoe, which was positioned close to the divider, then slides his hand along the bottom of the stall. There are more phases in Mr. Humphreys’s full lexicon — maneuvering, contracting, foreplay and payoff — but Mr. Craig was arrested after the officer presumed he had “signaled.”

Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig’s intentions, the police entrapped him. If the police officer hadn’t met his stare, answered that tap or done something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr. Humphreys was adamant and explicit: “On the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been ‘molested’ in such a setting without first having ‘given his consent.’ ”

As for those who feel that a family man and a conservative senator would be unlikely to engage in such acts, Mr. Humphreys’s research says otherwise. As a former Episcopal priest and closeted gay man himself, he was surprised when he interviewed his subjects to learn that most of them were married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.

In other words, not only did these men have nice families, they had nice families who seemed to believe what the fathers loudly preached about the sanctity of marriage. Mr. Humphreys called this paradox “the breastplate of righteousness.” The more a man had to lose by having a secret life, the more he acquired the trappings of respectability: “His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of his practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous — an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking.”

Mr. Humphreys even anticipated the vehement denials of men who are outed: “The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man, hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited.”

This last sentence brings to mind the hollow refutations of figures at the center of many recent public sex scandals, heterosexual and homosexual, notably Representative Mark Foley, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Senator David Vitter and now Senator Craig. The difference is that Larry Craig was arrested.

Public sex is certainly a public nuisance, but criminalizing consensual acts does not help. “The only harmful effects of these encounters, either direct or indirect, result from police activity,” Mr. Humphreys wrote. “Blackmail, payoffs, the destruction of reputations and families, all result from police intervention in the tearoom scene.” What community can afford to lose good citizens?

And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.

Laura M. Mac Donald is the author of “The Curse of the Narrows: The Story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion.”

[Sonic Youth]

On the other hand, have you guys seen this?! Capital hypocrisy with two capital Y's blowing each other (and the Y's are both dudes).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v....search=

Oh, good lord...

How could anyone have gotten the notion that he was gay?

[Sonic Youth]

I just logged on to reply in the same manner as you did, Sabin.
Although I abhor his political hypocrisies, I equally denounce the method by which he was entrapped.

I'm with you, cam, but I particularly denounce how the Republicans tossed him overboard. David Vitter acknowledged his dalliances with female prostitutes, and he's still in office, and no one is calling for his ouster. Then again, he's straight.

But Craig is a sad old queer doing all these perverted things, and what an embarrassment to have him in the party. Never mind that he didn't even break the law as far as I can tell. What did he do? He behaved like a creep, that's all. If it was his intention to have sex in the stall, he was stopped before it could take place. And maybe he WASN'T going to have sex right there. Maybe his intention was to go to a private room. There's no question he was cruising. But is that against the law? Is that lewd behavior? If his foot went underneath the stall and touched someone else, okay. Maybe that's a very minor misdemeanor. It's not nice to a willing participant, and he shouldn't do it. But how many politicians commit far more serious crimes and we never know about them, or they remain in office? How many straight politicians engage in boorish sexual behavior? He is a hypocrite (but they all are) and there's no question his character is very low. But that's for his wife to decide. That's for the Idaho voters to decide. He's a jerk, and he's put himself in this position. But I also feel a lot of sympathy for him.

[Sabin]

His secret burst wide open in a most odious way,

Oh, don't misunderstand me. It is hilarious. It's a completely hilarious story because it involves a closeted gay Republican caught in a web of his own hypocrisy. It's only a sad story because he now has to live the rest of his life. The punchline is amazing, but it doesn't end there. It ends with a lifetime of misery and compromise ahead of him.

On the other hand, have you guys seen this?! Capital hypocrisy with two capital Y's blowing each other (and the Y's are both dudes).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v....search=



Edited By Sabin on 1188686729

[99-1100896887]

I just logged on to reply in the same manner as you did, Sabin.
Although I abhor his political hypocrisies, I equally denounce the method by which he was entrapped.
I quite he agree that he probably loathed himself. His secret burst wide open in a most odious way, and I would think that he should be on suicide watch. I know someone that this sort of thing happened to, and he attempted suicide. He said he didn't have anything to live for: he'd lost his job, he'd likely lost his family, and , worst of all, he has lost his reputation. It took my friend twenty years to recover as a person. He had been a teacher.