Trying to remain calm within chaos

Mark Foley would like you to know that he is a big homo. No really. He wants it so badly that it is the first line of the article on Advocate.com:

Former Florida congressman Mark Foley “wants you to know he is a gay man,” Foley’s attorney said at a press conference on Tuesday

Well thanks Mark. It really means a lot to us here in the gay community that you are willing to take these steps towards being out.

But here is where I’m getting stuck… on the sheer unoriginality of all this.

While the situation certainly involves an abuse of power, the motivation is homosexual activity. Like Malcolm Forbes, these men set up their entire work lives in a way that enables them to have sex with men who surround them in their daily functions. This is the only way, in most cases, that they can have intimacy with other men. As public figures who are married to women and have images to keep up, they cannot be seen in gay bars or at gay parties. Even male escort services are risky. Sexual harssment and abuse of gay employees becomes the easiest and most practical way possible for them to fufill their sexual desires.

This was written in 1993, by Michelangelo Sigorile in his book Queer in America, specifically from the section titled “Queer in Washington”.

I can’t even say I am shocked by Foley’s behavior because the gay rights movement has has this pattern figured out for 13 freakin’ years. There is nothing new going on here, yet another case of a closet case too scared to just come out and get a nice boyfriend to fuck him regularly, so instead he resorts to sexual interest in the men (in this case young men) that work around him, so he uses his power over them to delude himself into thinking that they want him too when really its just creepy. Yawn.

What makes this so sad is that Foley could have prevented all of this by just coming out of the freakin’ closet years ago. The abuse of power, the sexual harrassment of teenage employees, the scandal and media attention. All completely preventable if Foley had just stopped using his votes against gay people in this country long enough to pick up a freakin book.