Speaking of book-learning vs. experience, via Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, who quotes Dan Savage, who quotes David Klinghoffer who in turn cites the ancient Roman Catullus on exactly how homosexuality is supposed to ruin heterosexual marriage.

The social history behind this piece is clear: once they’ve experienced sex with other men, Catullus tells us, men are unsatisfied with what their new wives provide them. Notice that the poet is unconcerned about the husband’s dallying with other women—it’s the other men around that threaten the marital union.

He said it here.

Is Klinghoffer mental? Yes, sex with one’s wife really would be unsatisfactory after homosexual sex if you’re homosexual! Otherwise? Not so much.

Seriously! The other year Jon Stewart asked Mike Huckabee when he decided he was heterosexual. Huckabee waived it off and, very unfortunately I think, Stewart didn’t pursue it further. Which is really, really unfortunate.

One of the problems with assuming heterosexuality is a baseline, an absolute, an anchor point against which all other is measured (and found wanting) is that it’s never itself examined. And so for Huckabee (and perhaps, come to think of it, for Stewart since he didn’t press the question) actually inquiring into whether heterosexuality might be a choice doesn’t make any sense at all.

Which is a shame because, duh, heterosexuality is no more a choice than homosexuality is. And so it would never occur to Catullus, or Huckabee or, evidently, Klinghoffer to reflect on the equal reality that if you’re already straight it’s equally true that “once they’ve experienced sex with women, figleaf tells us, men are just as unsatisfied with what other men provide them.”

That’s why it’s such a good idea to let people get married to the gender they actually want to get married to! If you think about it. Which evidently some people never get around to doing.

Sheesh!

So a while back Holly of The Pervocracy said

It’s truly amazing how many men there are on craigslist who are “straight, looking to suck & fuck with another straight guy.” On the one hand, I sorta get what they’re trying to say—straight in their daily life, stereotypically straight looking and acting—but on the other hand my mind always boggles a little.

It sort of makes me sad too. “I’m not some queer, I just fuck guys sometimes!” shouldn’t be something you need to think about yourself. I applaud the idea that sucking cock shouldn’t define your entire identity, but I hate that it’s done by linguistic denial of the sexuality itself.

She said it here.

What Holly said!

It’s easy to imagine (see the “shocking surprise” in American Beauty) that it’s closeted people like that who are often behave like the biggest homophobes. Well, easy to imagine in part because it’s sometimes true.

And it’s easy to imagine as well that the consequences of even more closeted, denial-based behavior (see attempted displacement predation on children, for instance) are responsible for quite a bit more of our most negative narratives about homosexuality. Because in part that too is true.

But I think it’s also the case that as Holly suggests there’s a probably larger and, I think, generally quieter and less disruptive population that doesn’t identify as “queer” or “gay” not because they aren’t attracted to men, or even prefer men, but because they don’t identify with the stereotypes of being queer or gay.

Which might be sort of like the gazillions of women who say “I’m not a feminist but…” Or women who say “I must secretly be a man because I enjoy…” Or men who are told because they’re emotional, or domestic, or unconflictedly monogamous that they’re in touch with their “feminine side.”

Or like that whistling-past-the-grave-yard joke “The difference between alcoholic and drunks is us drunks don’t have to go to them damn meetings.”

You have no impulse to be a hairdresser or interior decorator, you don’t mince or dish, you’re neither comfortable with nor attracted to flamboyantly, stereotypically gay men? Then maybe they might feel only common-parlance language really is “straight, looking to suck & fuck with another straight guy.”

In other words their stereotypes… our stereotypes!... aren’t big enough to encompass who we… any of us!... are.

And it’s not like we can just say “oh, let’s get rid of stereotypes.” (There comes the tide, here’s a broom. Good luck with that too.) It does say, though, that since we’re stuck with them it’s important to keep assessing them, challenging them to keep them. Otherwise they’ll continue to choke us.

Sheesh. This Larry Craig men’s room arrest thing just goes on and on. I was at the gym tonight and CNN was wall-to-wall panel discussions. Much of the discussion was inside baseball (how much will this hurt/help Republicans/Democrats) but every now and then a panelist, grasping for anything else to say, would pipe up about the hypocrisy issue of a gay anti-gay lawmaker.

If the story won’t go away, and if people are going to persist in talking about the hypocrisy angle, I guess it’s ok for me to post a reminder that the scandal isn’t the hypocrisy, it’s the policy! Hypocrites are a dime a dozen. So, unfortunately, are crappy, unworkable, often punitive or vindictive laws. There’s probably not a whole lot we can do about the former but there’s no excuse for the latter.

Consider: Larry Craig voted for a constitutional ban of same-sex marriage, against adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes, against expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation, for prohibiting same-sex marriage, in favor of job discrimination for sexual orientation, and as a state legislator against anything resembling civil unions. Craig also belonged to numerous “family values” groups, spoke vociferously on those issues, campaigned hard as a standard bearer of those values.

And yet…

And yet…

Despite all that, despite all his good will, all his exhaustive campaigning, all his research, all the testimony he heard, all the bills he voted for, all the money he raised for anti-gay groups…

Despite all that he continued to engage in homosexual behavior.

Worse, he engaged in the stereotypically creepy men’s-room cruising that he and most of his supporters find most alarming about homosexual behavior.

So…

Is his personal hypocrisy the scandal or is it the didn’t-even-work-for-him-even-though-he-wrote-them policies he’s spent his career advocating? (Clue: if you think it’s his hypocrisy you haven’t been paying attention.)

—-

I might add that there’s another Craig-related scandal at the policy level that I alluded to in previous post: if he, like so many of his conservative colleagues, is a covert, closet homosexual then the “family values” policies he’s been advocating are utter fiction.

Think about turning the tables — imagine even a well-meaning heterosexual trying to create policies that promoted homosexuality. With no experience, and perhaps compounded by good-will-driven efforts to “pass” for homosexual himself, you wouldn’t expect him to make proposals that actually accorded with issues that are most important to, let alone most beneficial to, real homosexuals. Such a clueless cheerleader might propose making purses available for gay men because, he might assume, all gay men are transvestites. Such a wannabe do-gooder might propose earmarks for grants to recognize “lisp-bonics” as a “legitimate” dialect!

In other words, he might merely attempt to legislate to the most extreme stereotypes without ever recognizing that…

well…

most homosexual men don’t cross dress, don’t mince and dish, aren’t fussy hairdressers or interior decorators, and don’t otherwise conform to heterosexually-generated stereotypes about them…

any more than most heterosexual men sit around in locker-rooms adjusting their balls nor stand around golf courses wearing mixed-plaid golf caps nor pissing in their Depends at the prospect that someone they know might be “a little light in the loafers.” Update: Or worrying that if their daughters got the same pay as their sons they’d never see grandchildren, etc., etc., etc.

Turning the world back upright again that’s exactly the sort of thing Craig, and Haggard, Allen, and Jim West or (from the chastity/fidelity/probity side) Vitter and Giuliani and McCain and Laura Schlessinger have tried to foist on real straight people. Update: Joe Conanson of Salon.com has a more extensive list dating back to the McCarthy era’s Roy Cohn. Mike Rogers of BlogActive is keeping the list more than current. (He’s the gay activist who broke the story of Craig’s arrest, among other outings of closeted gay Republicans who vote anti-gay.)

Again, it’s not their personal hypocrisy that’s a problem. It’s the clueless, whole-cloth-fiction-based policies they try to foist off on the rest of us — normal heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, trans- inter- and asexuals — in hopes we’ll mistake them for “one of us.”

Thanks but no thanks.

@#$!@!~@%