The Sad Case of the Delusional Senator

I haven't been keeping up here much this week, there's been a lot of stuff going on.  But this story about the Senator playing footsies in the men's-room really seems to have got people's attention, and in an interesting way.  It seems like everybody who has something to say about this has something different to say.

(By the way, everybody is saying that Larry Craig will resign tomorrow.  They've already got his successor picked out, the guy's dead meat.  I'm getting to this feeding frenzy a little late, but it's still got a lot for us to think about.)

Like, some people have used this to talk about why anybody would want to have anonymous sex in a public restroom.  That's a good question -- it's dirty, it's not really very private, there's a significantly nonzero chance of getting caught.  Why would anybody want to do that?  Some elaborate this thought by mentioning Mile-High Clubs and pickup bars and things that heterosexuals do with strangers or where they might get caught, the difference being that restrooms are segregated by sex.  OK, good point, same-sex stuff is going to happen in a room where only one sex can go, maybe some straight people do essentially this same sort of thing, just not there.

Others have used this to open the innateness/choice question.  It seems weird to see this Senator saying, "I'm not gay," when he is obviously busted, and stories have been going around for years about him.  Is he gay, or not?

I'll go with this: he's right, he's "not gay," for the simple reason that he says he isn't.  He does not identify himself as a homosexual person, he just ... has sex with guys whenever he can.  How's that feel to you?

Let me go off on a tangent for a second, just to hedge my bet.  It could be -- could be -- that this is just something he does for the addictive thrill of almost getting caught.  Maybe the sexual part is nothing.  The Post had a pretty good story yesterday where a psychiatrist said "What I found is that many of these people are hardworking and struggling hard to be in control. . . . Anybody can have a compulsion, whether it's a sexual compulsion or some other compulsion..."  So to this shrink, it sounds like the sexual component is more-or-less arbitrary.

I'm not thinking so.

Take a heroin addict.  The thing is, you don't become an addict if you don't take the stuff to begin with.  Most people walk around without ever sticking a needle full of heroin in their arm, just like most guys walk around without giving a thought to propositioning the guy in the next stall.  I don't know what makes a person decide to try heroin, and I don't know why a guy starts a game of footsies with an undercover cop in an airport restroom.

But I'm thinking it's not arbitrary, it's something besides just taking a chance on getting caught.  A guy like this feels a need to have sex with another man, specifically.  It's different from drag-racing or playing Russian roulette.

To understand this, you have to peel the onion of sexual identity, at least a few layers.  Because we have an apparent contradiction here.  We have a man who is irresistibly drawn to having sex with other men, and at the same time he describes himself as "not gay" and in fact, has actively pursued legislation to make like harder for guys who have romantic relationships with other guys.  Let's say that's two contradictions: his behavior and professed sexual identity, and his behavior and his position on the policy issues.

Larry Craig's self-contradictions show us several things.  First, he is a great example of the distinction between sexual behavior and sexual identity.  You can have sex with men, over and over again, yet identify yourself as heterosexual, as your innate urges are pushed out of your self-identity.  Conservatives see this as a good thing.  Yes, they agree that some people have these desires, and there's no argument about whether the desires themselves are innate, everybody knows they are.  But what you're supposed to do, when you have these desires, is to construct a sexual identity that defeats them.  You are supposed to make yourself be straight.

This depends on a model where identity and innate physical attraction are independent of one another.  And can we agree that this model has failed in the Larry Craig case?  And also in the Ted Haggard case, and many others?  It fails because the model also requires that the cognitive component, the sexual identity part, has to be stronger than the physical attraction part.  Maybe sometimes it is, nobody knows how many people are secretly homosexual, and are presenting themselves differently from how they feel.  Nobody knows.  The point is, maybe sometimes, if you click your heels three times and grit your teeth for seventy or eighty years, you can live as a heterosexual even though your physical attractions are different from that.

Why would somebody define themselves in such a way that they have to deny themselves not only the physical pleasure of honest sex, but the companionship and love that grows up around it?  I'd say they'd do that because they feel a tremendous amount of social pressure.  It may come from their church community, or it might just be things the guys say on the playground, but the pressure to "be normal" can be very intense and hard to resist.

I guess I need to say out loud what the alternative model is.  The alternative model is a model of psychological health where a person lives happily with the feelings that the Good Lord (and/or Mother Nature) gave them.  This is a model where sexual identity is compatible with physical attraction.  It's the model where guys who are attracted to guys call themselves, right out loud, "gay" or whatever the term du jour is, and their expression is consistent with their actual feelings.

Because, I think this is obvious but I'll say it anyway, when Larry Craig says he's "not gay" he is simply telling us that he is delusional.  He is expressing a kind of denial and a kind of psychopathology where the self-identity has developed around a falsehood.  I agree, he's "not gay," because he says he's not, his social self-presentation does not include his true feelings, maybe he even believes he is "not gay."  But the divorce of innate feelings and socially-presented sexual identity is not an ideal, and it seems to me that unhappiness is the result, whether the person is successful in behaving in accordance with a delusional sexual identity, or not.