American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  “Every year around Halloween, I see some columnist or blogger or others talk about how ‘Halloween is just an excuse for girls and women to whore it up all night,’” writes Nicolechat on another post at Feministing.com about sexy costumes. “But every time I read that, I think to myself, so what? What’s wrong with having a night where we can say ‘This is my body, and I’m not ashamed of it, or of using it to express my sexuality.’”

  There’s nothing wrong with it, Nicolechat, nothing at all.

  Heterosexuals in North America have needed a holiday like this for a long, long time. And now they’ve got one. Halloween is yours now, straight people, please be good to it. And girls? Wrap those bandages loosely and by midnight your boyfriend’s “mummy” costume will be just as revealing as that off-the-rack “sexy witch” outfit you bought at the costume shop.

  Happy Heteroween.

  10. Four Closet Cases

  Shortly after I came out to my family, I started sneaking into gay bars on the—no, wait. Let me start over.

  Shortly before I came out to my family, I was already sneaking into gay bars on the north side of Chicago. Looking back, I can see how dangerous this was. I wasn’t quite eighteen yet, and I was more attractive than I realized at the time. It was the summer of 1982, and I was hanging around in gay bars, desperate for affection and affirmation, just as a deadly virus was taking root in the gay community. The Centers for Disease Control would give the virus a name that summer: “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.”

  The insecurities and social awkwardness that rendered me incapable of realizing when someone was trying to pick me up may have saved my life in the summer of ’82.

  If my parents had known what I was doing at night, and where I was going, they surely would’ve intervened. But they didn’t know what I was doing because I was working so hard to hide it—to hide myself—from them. Like a lot of gay teenagers, I was flying blind into adult social and sexual situations.

  I don’t remember much about the first gay bar I walked into, but I can vaguely remember what I had to drink: a Long Island Iced Tea, I’m embarrassed to say. I do remember what it felt like to walk into a gay bar for the first time, though. I had spent all day, every day, for the last six years of my life trying to hide my homosexuality from my family, from my friends, from my classmates, from my teachers, from strangers on the street and on the L. To step through that door and feel that pressure lift made me feel lightheaded. It was like stepping through an airlock; I’m surprised my ears didn’t pop.

  I quickly made some friends my own age, other teenagers who were slipping into gay bars at night, kids like me, who weren’t out to their parents or friends from school. We became a posse.

  We mostly went to the bars where the twentysomethings hung out, but there were always older guys in “our” bars, guys in their fifties, guys in their sixties. These men were in bars they were way too old for, and some of them pursued guys who were way too young for them. I felt sorry for the older gay men. My friends didn’t. They made fun of the “old trolls,” as they cruelly called them; although they would condescend to accept drinks from the old trolls just the same.

  Unlike most of the other boys in my posse, I knew a little gay history. I could also add and subtract. When the older men in the bars were seventeen, it was 1942 or 1932—and it might as well have been 1642 for all the difference it made.

  When the older men we were meeting in the bars were seventeen, I told my friends, it just wasn’t possible to be an openly gay teenager. There weren’t gay youth groups or gay bookstores or gay neighborhoods. “Give ’em a break,” I used to tell my friends. “They missed out.”

  And when I got to know some of these older guys, I was shocked—shocked!—to discover that not all of them lusted after me and my friends. Some of them lusted after other middle-aged guys; others had long-term boyfriends at home. Most were closeted at work or to their extended families, and they needed to step through the airlock, just like I did, to escape the pressure of a half-closeted life.

  But many, as I suspected, had indeed “missed out.” Most of the older men I got to know that summer had married and had children long before the Stonewall Riots. They had known they were gay when they took their vows, but they didn’t think they had any other options then—they had to pass; they had to find wives; they had to have children. There were no other options.

  Consequently, their coming-out experiences had been messy, protracted, and painful. A few of them had come out willingly, but most told stories of getting caught or being discovered. The term hadn’t been invented yet, but a few had been outed. Most of the coming-out stories ended with marriages dissolved, children estranged, and careers destroyed. Hearing their stories made me feel even sorrier for them.

  Jim West, a prominent Republican politician in Washington State, had a messy, protracted, and painful coming-out experience—and that’s putting it mildly. An elected official for more than twenty years, West was one of Washington’s most prominent and powerful homophobes. During his two decades in the state legislature, West backed a bill that would have made it illegal for gay men and lesbians to work in schools and day care centers; he voted to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman; he personally killed a bill that would have protected gays and lesbians from discrimination; he proposed a law that would have made sex between consenting teenagers—gay or straight—a felony in Washington State.

  West left the Washington State legislature in 2003 to run for mayor of Spokane, Washington. West won that race, just as he’d won every race he had ever entered, and immediately after being sworn in, West moved to veto a new law providing benefits to domestic partners of gay city employees.

  When Spokane’s daily newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, heard rumors that West was trawling the Internet for gay teenagers, the paper began trawling the Internet for West. It didn’t take long to locate West in a Gay.com chat room, where he went by the handle “Cobra82.” West offered a city internship to a reporter who he thought was an eighteen-year-old boy, with the understanding that the boy would have sex with him. (Now we know why West wanted to ban sex between teenagers: He wanted the teenage boys all for himself.) In May of 2005, The Spokesman-Review published a long story on West’s secret double life, and on December 6 of the same year, voters turned West out of office in a recall election.

  As chance would have it, I was in Spokane the day Jim West was forced from office. My husband had grown up there, and we were visiting his family. Spokane is a good place to be from, Terry likes to say—far from. Spokane is religious, conservative, sprawling, and overwhelmingly white, and it’s not an easy place to be gay or African-American or Democratic or Jewish or an atheist or a pedestrian.

  It certainly wasn’t an easy place for my husband to grow up; he was physically assaulted repeatedly in high school. (When his mother complained to the principal, she was told that the abuse would continue so long as he insisted on “acting like that.”) And Spokane can’t have been an easy place for West to grow up either. But none of the sympathy I felt for the middle-aged gay men I met in the early 1980s extended to West—or to many closeted middle-aged men today.

  Because I can still add and subtract.

  West was born in 1951. He was eighteen in 1969, the year of the Stonewall Riots. He was twenty-six in 1977, the year that Harvey Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. West was thirty-one years old when I was eighteen and hanging out in bars in Chicago. West was thirty-four years old when Terry was being beaten in his Spokane high school, in a district that West represented in the Washington State legislature.

  Jim West didn’t have to live a lie. He could have lived as an openly gay or bisexual man—West, who had once been married, claimed to be bisexual in interviews about the scandal, though all of the pictures found on his work computers were of young men—but he chose not to. Unlike those older gay men I met in 1982, West and other closeted middle-aged men today didn’t come of age at a time when no
one could conceive of openly gay and lesbian people and communities. (Or politicians: Washington State has five openly gay members of its legislature; there was at least one openly gay member of Washington State’s legislature every year that West himself was a member of the legislature.) Jim West had options. But he chose the closet and shame and lies and hypocrisy.

  And like a lot of politically powerful closet cases, West covered for his homosexuality by pushing anti-gay legislation. No one would suspect him of being gay, West calculated, so long as he was the biggest bigot in the Washington State legislature.

  Ted Haggard was born in 1956. He was thirteen at the time of the Stonewall Riots, and twenty-one the year that Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Haggard was the pastor of a mega-church he founded in Colorado Springs; and like West, he was a politically powerful, high-profile homophobe.

  In 2006 Haggard was outed by Mike Jones, a Denver-based male escort that Haggard had been patronizing for years. The ensuing scandal didn’t tell us much we don’t already know about closeted gay men. The common themes that link West and Haggard are the enormous risks these men took to get their needs met, and the harm they were willing to do to other gay people in an effort to cover for themselves.

  There was something new in the Haggard scandal—perhaps we should call it the Haggard flameout—and that was the refusal of Mike Jones to honor the callboy’s code of silence, the omertà of gay hookerdom.

  I have a friend who used to do sex work. He was based in Los Angeles at the time, and one of his clients was a movie star. A big movie star. A top movie star. A male sex symbol. This guy used to send a private jet to pick up my friend and fly him to isolated, far-flung resorts, to help him “unwind” after shooting a film.

  I can’t tell you who this movie star is. It’s not that I’m afraid of being sued or that I necessarily disapprove of outing.1 I don’t know the movie star’s name. No matter how many times I asked, no matter how much I pried, my sex worker friend simply wouldn’t tell me the star’s name. My friend wouldn’t even tell me where he was meeting his famous client, lest the locations where his films were being shot offer a clue. My friend took the callboy’s code of silence seriously.

  On the website where Ted Haggard found Mike Jones, the callboys all describe themselves as discreet. That’s a solemn promise not to blab to the wife if you’re married; to the tabloids (or to prying friends) if you’re a movie star; to your congregation if you’re one of the most powerful evangelical ministers in the country. (Haggard was the head of the National Association of Evangelicals; Haggard spoke with then-president George W. Bush on a weekly basis.) Mike Jones never outed a client before Haggard. But Jones broke the callboy code of silence because Haggard’s hypocrisy offended him. The fear that callboys can no longer be trusted will doubtless make the lives of men like Ted Haggard that much more lonely and difficult.

  Back in the bad old days—back in the mythical 1950s, the era social conservatives pine for—most gay men were closeted, like the middle-aged guys I got to know that summer had been earlier in their lives, and in one way this made it easier for closeted men to arrange trysts. You could rely on the discretion of your sex partners back then because they were relying on yours. It was the era of mutually assured destruction, both in terms of nuclear warfare and gay sex. Your partner couldn’t reveal your secret without revealing his own.

  Needless to say, a sex life infused with Cold War–style tensions didn’t lead to many healthy or lasting relationships.

  Today gay and bisexual men live openly, making the modern closet a much less crowded place. While all the best gay men used to be closeted, the only adults you find in the closet today are the fearful, the compromised, and the hypocritical. They’re public figures whose lucrative careers in film or politics would collapse if they came out; gay men whose obscenely wealthy families would disown them if they lived openly; or gay men leading congregations that would dismiss them if they knew the truth about their pastor.

  A less crowded closet doesn’t just mean slimmer pickings for men like Ted Haggard, but highly unreliable ones as well. Decades ago you could be certain that the closeted gay man you were sleeping with would still be closeted ten or twenty years later. Now you never know. The closeted gay man you entrust with your secret today might be out next year. And if he has nothing left to hide, your secret is no longer safe. Better hope you parted on good terms.

  Which is why so many powerful closet cases turn to callboys. It’s not just the callboy’s promise of discretion, but the sense that the old dynamics—mutually assured destruction—remain in force. A callboy can’t expose your secret without exposing his own. There’s still a stigma attached to selling sex.

  So why did Mike Jones speak out?

  Because today it is arguably more shameful to be a hypocritical closet case than it is to be an honest sex worker. (Although gay political organizations treated Jones pretty shabbily.) Even those delighted by Haggard’s fall—and I count myself among their number—ached for his children, who suffered for the sins of their father. And let me be clear: Their father’s sin was not his sexual orientation; it wasn’t seeing rent boys or even using meth. Haggard’s sin was hypocrisy. His sin was the closet.

  As was—as is—Larry Craig’s.

  Craig isn’t the only straight-identified man who has ever been arrested cruising for sex in a public toilet. Indeed, most of the men who are arrested for having “gay” sex in public restrooms have wives waiting at home. Craig wasn’t even the first man arrested cruising for sex in that particular restroom at that particular airport on that particular day. Forty other men were arrested as part of the same sting operation at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport after complaints from annoyed travelers who wanted to use the bathroom for its intended purpose. The reason we heard about Craig’s arrest, to the exclusion of all the others, was that Craig had the misfortune of being the only sitting US senator—the only rabidly anti-gay sitting US senator—cruising for sex in that particular bathroom on that particular day.

  Craig, of course, claimed he was innocent and that his actions were misconstrued. Why was Craig tapping his toes while he sat on the toilet? Craig explained that he has a restless leg. Why did his foot slide under the divider, nudging the foot of an undercover officer in the next stall? Craig claimed he has a “wide stance.”

  Craig was born in 1945. He was twenty-four years old at the time of the Stonewall Riots. He was thirty-two when Harvey Milk—who was born in 1930—was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Like West and Haggard, Craig didn’t have to live in the closet. And like West and Haggard, Craig was publicly straight but someone else entirely in the privacy of an airport stall, just as Jim West was someone else entirely in Gay.com chat rooms, and Ted Haggard was someone else entirely when he could get to Denver.

  And George Rekers? He was someone else entirely in Europe.

  Rekers is a psychologist and an ordained Baptist minister. He also cofounded the Family Research Council, an anti-gay hate group currently headed by Tony Perkins, and for many years Rekers served as an adviser to the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, an organization that promotes “conversion therapy.” In the early 1970s, when Rekers was a doctoral student at UCLA, he developed the infamous “Sissy Boy” Experiment that subjected dozens of boys, some as young as five, to harsh punishment if they displayed any non-masculine behaviors or interests. This research would be the bedrock for his thirty-year career as a conversion therapist. Rekers was one of eight contributors to the Handbook of Therapy for Unwanted Homosexual Attractions, published in 2009. In that book, Rekers specifically cited one of the boys in his study, Kirk Murphy, as a successful example of conversion therapy. One tragic fact shows Rekers’s callous indifference to the real human toll of his pseudo-therapy: In 2003, six years before this book appeared, Murphy committed suicide.

  In 2010 Rekers was caught returning from a two-week European vacation with a mal
e escort. Rekers angrily denied reports that he was gay, and claimed that he took the male prostitute on the trip to “lift his luggage.” Rekers claimed that he needed his luggage lifted for him because he has a bad back. Why take a gay male escort to Europe to lift your luggage? (Are there no bellmen in Europe?) Rekers stated that he hoped to talk the young man out of being gay during the trip. The young man told reporters that he gave Rekers nude “sexual massages” during the trip.

  Rekers was born in 1948. He was twenty-one at the time of the Stonewall Riots and twenty-nine when Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

  I have a great deal of sympathy for the older gay men I met in Chicago’s gay bars in 1982. Their personal lives were messy. Like West, Haggard, Craig, and Rekers, they had victimized people; their wives, mostly, and their kids. But these men married and had children under duress in the 1940s and 1950s. They didn’t have a real or meaningful choice; they were forced into their closets.

  When I meet someone now who’s in his fifties or sixties and is just coming out, I don’t think ill of him. I’m glad for him. I hope he finds happiness, and I hope he makes up for lost time. But when I meet someone, or hear about someone, who is still closeted at that age…I don’t feel much in the way of sympathy. I feel a certain anger-tinged impatience, to be honest. I have a difficult time regarding being closeted at fifty or sixty as anything other than a self-inflicted injury. Being gay isn’t a choice. Remaining closeted all your adult life is. And it’s not a tragedy; it’s a moral failing. It’s cowardice.

  West, Haggard, Craig, and Rekers had a choice, and they chose to remain closeted and to use homophobia to deflect attention from their sexualities. Unlike the older guys I met in 1982, they didn’t miss out. They opted out.