Saints Reward Punctuality with a Tap Tap Tap

Being that today is National Tap Dance Day, the first 2,500 fans in attendance at the St. Paul Saints baseball game today will receive a bobblefoot. The foot that peaks out of the bottom of the bathroom stall taps up and down in "tribute to all the toe-tapping friends and fans from around the nation who may ever have set foot in Minneapolis-St. Paul… even for just a change of planes."

We want one!

Love to J'Doh for passing this gem along.

Out at the Chicago History Museum presents - Sexual Politics: From the Lavender Scare to Larry Craig

Chicago History Museum

1601 N. Clark St.
Chicago
312.642.4600

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Cocktail hour at 5:30 p.m.; Program at 6:30 p.m.; reception to follow

Kick off this election year by exploring how homosexuality repeatedly finds its way into the nation’s political spotlight. Join gay historians David Johnson and Lane Fenrich as they recount a half-century of gay men and lesbians in the public eye.

Cost:
$15; $12 members and students.

> Purchase tickets

WHY POLICE BOTHER IS ANOTHER MATTER

Craig was talking the talk

By Rex Wockner in the Chicago Tribune

Even though a judge ruled last week that Sen. Larry Craig cannot withdraw his guilty plea stemming from a Minneapolis airport sex sting operation, the Idaho Republican says he has changed his mind about resigning from Congress.

Which raises the question: What will it take to make this guy go away? Here we are six weeks after Craig's arrest became public, and the story just will not die. This is intolerable -- even for gay folks like me. I can only imagine how straight people must feel.

So, if you don't mind terribly, I'd like to do my part to help kill this story off, put it out of its misery, make it go away forever. This will require a bit of setup, and I'll have to spoon-feed some straight readers some gay secrets.

The most amazing thing for me is that Craig still insists he wasn't "cruising," which is gay lingo for looking for partners in men's rooms, forest preserves, rest areas and the like (remember George Michael? Wham!), or even just while walking down the street or shopping at Jewel.

Assuming the airport police report is accurate, and by ruling against Craig on Thursday that is exactly what a Minnesota judge did, the insurmountable problem with Craig's insistence is this: We know better.

Read the rest in the Chicago Tribune.

Offenses [Senator Larry Craig's role in our march toward equality]

by Hendrik Hertzberg for The New Yorker
September 17, 2007

On the evening of January 21, 1953, Bayard Rustin, a forty-year-old organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a leading organization of religious pacifists, gave a talk, in Pasadena, California, about anti-colonial struggles in West Africa. Among the admirers who approached him after the speech were two young men. Late that night, he and the young men were arrested after being discovered in flagrante in a parked car. He pleaded guilty to a charge of “lewd vagrancy” and was carted off to serve sixty days behind bars.

The episode was a source of shame for Rustin, not on account of his homosexuality (about which, for that era, he was astonishingly relaxed) or because of the stigma of jail (he had spent two years in federal prison as a conscientious objector) but because he knew that his carelessness had let down his colleagues in the nonviolent movements for peace and racial equality. Yet his service to those causes did not end. Though he had to resign from the F.O.R., its secular twin, the War Resisters League, soon hired him as its executive secretary. In 1956, he became a mentor to the young Martin Luther King, Jr., beginning an association that, while rocky at times, culminated, on August 28, 1963, in the epochal March on Washington. The cover of the next issue of Life featured not King but the instigator of the march, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and its principal organizer, Bayard Rustin.

Rustin’s homosexuality, the Pasadena incident in particular, embarrassed and angered some of his political comrades. But none of them responded to it with cruelty or contempt. Senator Larry Craig, of Idaho, has not been so lucky. No sooner had Craig’s brother Republican politicians learned that he had been caught with his pants down in a men’s-room stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (where, a year from now, they will arrive by the planeload for their National Convention) than the stampede began. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, pronounced Craig’s conduct “unforgivable” and forced him to relinquish his posts as the senior Republican on three Senate committees. From the campaign trail, Senator John McCain called for the miscreant’s resignation. “I don’t try to judge people, but in this case it’s clear that it was disgraceful,” the Senator judged. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, offered a singularly unfeeling response to the troubles of the man who, until the day before, had been the Idaho co-chairman of, and one of two “Senate liaisons” to, the Romney for President campaign. “Frankly,” Romney said, “it’s disgusting.”

Read the rest.

America’s Toe-Tapping Menace

By LAURA M. Mac DONALD in the New York Times
Published: September 2, 2007

WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.

In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.

That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.

Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”

Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.

Read the rest.

Sen. Larry Craig: Sexual Behavior, Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Understood

The National Black Justice Coalition's
H. Alexander Robinson (left) responds to the Senator Craig restroom incident

Sen. Larry Craig’s recent sexual restroom exploits have given the American community an unexpected but valuable teachable moment that should be embraced and further understood.

Instead of running from the tabloid fodder, late night talk show jokes, and Sunday morning sermons that will undoubtedly come from this incident; the LGBT community should instead embrace Sen. Craig’s gay sex solicitation incident as an opportunity to talk candidly and knowledgeably about the fluidity of sexuality and its effects upon gay identity and gay sexual orientation.

There are four vital lessons that can be learned from Sen. Craig’s situation, each of which flies in the face of conventional wisdom and understanding of sexuality.

Read the rest.

Larry Craig is Definitely Not Gay

From LifeLube pal Stewart Landers, of the Landers Health Report

A proud gay man lives his adult life with his male partner or husband, not a wife and kids. Gay men do not support a constitutional amendment to prohibit same sex marriage. Gay men do not vote against long-overdue legislation that would protect gay men and lesbians from discrimination in the work place (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or ENDA).

On the other hand, repressed, hypocritical, right-wing politicians with homosexual tendencies behave exactly as Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) has done in the past two months and throughout his political career. How ludicrous to believe that one of the hundred or so most powerful people in the United States was intimidated by a Minnesota beat officer into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.

Read the rest.