Craig looks deep into his soul and declares:

"Yes. I'm a man who likes to have anonymous, frequent,

unprotected, sex with men in airport toilets"

God bless America! God bless the freedom to express

your sexuality in the world's greatest democracy!

My Kind of Men's Room

Americans want to believe that we are as a society

deeply tolerant of the right of people

to possess a diversity of sexual preferences

Yet, we are quick to box men like Craig

into the narrow categories of "gay" or "bisexual"

- perhaps in denial, perhaps in the closet,

but nevertheless in a firm place

along a rigid "hetero-homo" axis of sexuality

The Men's Room Is Hardly the Closet

Thank god I can stop feeling sorry for poor, dim Fredo [Gonzales] and turn my full attentions to the Mark Foley-esque excitement that Senator Larry Craig can look forward to now that all of America knows about his restroom romance.

Reporters stalking him and his family, old allegations being dusted off and autopsied, liberals denouncing the hypocrisy of his opposition to gay rights, his colleagues fleeing the john whenever he enters, his ultimate exile from the Capitol's hallowed halls ...

If the 1982 rumors about Craig's behaving inappropriately with underage congressional pages have even a grain of truth, Craig deserves all this grief and more.

But the hypocrisy charges being thrown around seem a bit too simplistic for a behavior that seems firmly rooted in fear and self-loathing.

Craig is gay. Or, if we are to accept his repeated denials of technical gayness, Craig is a happily married hetero who in his spare time just happens to enjoy soliciting anonymous sex from members of his own gender.

Fine. He says "tomato," I say "gay."

Because of Craig's upbringing, his religious beliefs, or what have you, he cannot come to terms with his homosexuality. But at the same time, he cannot control it, and he occasionally gets caught with his proverbial, and literal, pants down.

At that point, he has to take drastic action to cover his tracks. For instance, last October, gay activist blogger Mike Rogers published allegations from men claiming to have had sex with Craig.

Not long thereafter, the Senator issued a statement pledging his support for an amendment to the Idaho constitution banning gay marriage and civil unions. One can only speculate as to whether the press release's headline originally read:

"See, I told you I'm not One of Them!"

(Another sequence of events now being revisited involves Craig's asking his now-wife to marry him just six months after he was caught up in '82 page scandal.)

It's not so much that Craig has been championing traditional piety for others while wallowing in his own vice--the kind of tiresome hypocrisy so often practiced by Republican congressmen who fan the family values flames even as they cheat on their wives with hottie Hill staffers. (Yes, Newt, that includes you.)

Rather, Craig has been championing traditional piety for others as part of a desperate attempt to cover up a dirty little secret that he so clearly hates himself for.

Queer As a Senator from Idaho

Americans are having a field day mocking Larry Craig: who could resist jabbing at a conservative senator caught (pardon the expression) with his pants down soliciting sex from another man in a public toilet?

Craig's vociferous assertion that "I am not gay and never have been" has only fueled speculation that he is in deep denial about his true desires, as well as incited mockery at the irreconcilability between Craig's homophobic social politics and his preferred company.

While the events of this week have titillated the public and filled progressives with glee at the fall of an ideological opponent, Craig's saga also challenges our modern understanding of homosexuality.

Americans want to believe that we are society deeply tolerant of the right of people to possess a diversity of sexual preferences. Yet, we are quick to box men like Craig into the narrow categories of "gay" or "bisexual" - perhaps in denial, perhaps in the closet, but nevertheless in a firm place along a rigid "hetero-homo" axis of sexuality.

But once upon a time, men like Craig were actually viewed on terms that, though not necessarily accepting of their behavior, may have been in closer accordance with their real desire to be tacitly permitted to engage in sexual relationships with other men while still being viewed as "straight."

In his groundbreaking book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, the historian George Chauncey uncovered a vibrant gay male world that proliferated, sometimes quite openly, in the working-class dance halls, saloons and hostels of New York City during the early 20th century.

As Chauncey explains, this subculture "permitted men to engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves - or to be regarded by others - as gay."

Even as they partook in behavior neatly defined today as "gay" - from the type of discrete flirting with another man that Craig allegedly engaged in up to actual intercourse with cross-dressing prostitute "fairies" - these men were not considered gay or even bisexual, let alone "confused," "conflicted" or "in denial."

Rather, according to Chauncey, the early 20th century culture's notion of normative masculinity had an established niche for "heterosexual" men who might also have an occasional desire for a different type of bodily pleasure that only another male could provide.

A married man could pick up a "fairy" (a male prostitute) in Times Square and still be seen as straight: merely in need of a particular experience he could not obtain from his wife.

During the late 1930s and 1940s, Chauncey writes, the lines between the gay and straight worlds hardened.

The Great Depression's challenge to the male's role as familial breadwinner led to fears that the "deviant perversity" of gays would further undermine the normative gender arrangements rendered fragile by economic collapse.

Municipal authorities responded to the dominant cultural fear by explicitly outlawing men from attempting to pick up other men. Such new regulations, strengthened in the post-World War II crackdowns on gays in urban centers, made it increasingly difficult for the occasional homosexual to navigate the two worlds safely.

While much of the homophobia of the past has thankfully been diminished due to the efforts of progressive activism beginning in the 1970s, our era is not yet so tolerant that we have abandoned the anxious view that gay is gay, and straight is straight, and never the twain shall meet.

Though we have much to learn about this story, what has emerged thus far suggests that Craig may fit into this amorphous category: he is alleged to have had several isolated homosexual encounters in his adult life, not sustained affairs with other men.

Perhaps, then, Craig's conservatism makes him a throwback to the past in more than one way. Alongside his retro social traditionalism, he fits within a category of masculinity that has faded from the popular consciousness: one in which homosexual acts were not co-terminal with homosexual identity.

Unfortunately, Craig has devoted his career to fighting for a far more rigid, uncompromising view of gay sexuality as a monolithic threat to "family values". And while he desperately denies the charge, his hypocrisy is coming out to haunt him.