Homo Re: The Media and Mark Foley
posted by on October 13 at 10:07 AM
Eli, some reporters directly asked Foley if he was gay—and Foley denied it, just as Esser did when you asked him directly last year. So I don’t agree that Esser’s denial somehow put the rumors about him definitively to rest. Foley lied, Eli—hell, that’s what the closet is. It’s a lie you tell hundreds of times every day. What if Esser lied?
The difference here is not that one man was asked and the other wasn’t, but that Foley was openly closeted—he had a boyfriend, people knew he was gay. He refused to say that he was gay, but he didn’t try that hard to hide his homosexuality. Foley trusted that the media’s highly selective respect for privacy—it seems to kick in most strongly when it comes to homosexuality (witness those Susan Sontag obits)—would prompt reporters and editors to protect his relatively open secret.
Is someone in the media keeping secrets for Luke Esser? I don’t know that, anymore than I know if Esser, a conservative Republican in the state legislature, is gay or not. But whether or not Esser is gay, rumors about his sexuality continue to circulate, despite his denial.
Jim McGreavey spoke in Redmond this week. I went expecting to witness a complete schmuck hocking his new book describing what a schmuck he's been. That's pretty much what I saw, but I do think he's legitimately trying to be less of a schmuck these days. Something about working with suicidal queer youth, which is admirable, though the announcement thereof is probably ill-timed in light of the Foley scandal. Anyhoo, he did mention that in a previous race for New Jersey Governor, his opponent's negative research had dug up enough leads to further investigate his homosexuality, and that (at least he reports) she explicitly told her staff not to use them. It's not just the media, it the political gaming machine that reinforces the closet.
Wasn't the whole Esser issue more that the media was slinging rumors around without any input from the, erm, "accused", and without much real evidence? Please excuse me if I didn't pay enough attention (I was still reading the print edition of the Stranger when that all happened, and, you know, the back half of the paper is pretty distracting) & missed something, but what I got out of Eli's question & Esser's response was more of an issue of journalistic methods- going to the source instead of "he-said-she-saw". Then you can wrangle over whether the source/subject is telling the truth as much as you want.
Dan, I don't get it. You know full well that unsubstantiated rumors are worthless. We have no real reason to believe that Luke Esser is gay. By the same token we have no real reason to believe that, say, Rodney Tom is gay.
That's not to say that one or both of them aren't gay, but why should any of us care either way?
Stefan, we should care if and when they misrepresent our issues, as Jim West did in our own back yard. Hypocrisy is not something we should be voting for.
Chris,
Thank you.
And it's totally fair to say the Republicans have won the Hypocrisy Olympics.
Practically everything they do is the opposite of their supposed values. There's so much cognitive dissonance now that no one can think straight (pun intended).
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