str8

Larry Craig? Gay? I think not. Permit me not to choose the obvious path of catty remarks. (Well, maybe a few). I’ve read probably all the angles to his story- hypocrisy, self-loathing, entrapment, even the McGreevey woman’s slant. What has failed to surface though, is a little broader and a lot less intellectually charged than most wags have let on, viz; Straight men have sex with men too. Men are hard-wired to get it off, with only one low hurdle to clear in order to protect their self-image; justification. Let me site a few of them. "I was drunk [high][vulnerable][hanging out in a men’s room]", " He gave me money [a ride][a job][jewelry], I didn’t reciprocate [like it][ever do it again][talk], I was young [in prison][between girlfriends][feeling pretty]. I’ll spare you the hard links, but countless websites are devoted to straight men performing for a male audience. And they do a pretty good job. Unspokenly at the center of the current media frenzy is one of those shades of gray maybe not entirely clarified by the Kinsey scale; Str8 men (who have sex with men too). I resist using a "Brokeback Mountain" analogy because those boys shared a history, an emotional attachment, and [presumably] remained exclusive. Gay requires commitment, Str8 requires scheduling. Bathrooms, bars, parks, truck stops, apses- these all provide an accessible backdrop for str8 men to wander away from their identified orientation for sex that is as much a sport as it is a way of having it off- and we all know how they love their sports. Often enough, both parties identify as straight and after the moist towelette, neither is any less so. Let me make a clear delineation between these guys ‘trolling for trade’ and predators. I’m not talking about encounters where either party could be characterized as a victim, unless one of those men happen to be a police officer. I am most definitely talking about men negotiating to have sex with other men, with the courtship ritual reduced to just the few signals Mr. Craig demonstrated. I have no idea if there is a covert network of str8 men who will cover for each other (my knowledge of the subject is only general) but the willingness to accept ‘straight’ as ‘absolutely straight’ clouds too much of the commentary. If some woman in Boise were to surface with a headline like; "My Son’s Friend Larry Painted My Ceiling"or " Larry was such a polite child...not like the others.." I might have been ready to own him, but it’s clear. He’s only a sexual opportunist. Let he and the life he built around it work out the details.