I learned of the “foot tapping” thing, appropriately enough, in college.
Being a maintenance worker at my university must have been an extremely frustrating job, as there was a group of men (or who knows, maybe just one insanely prolific one) who were relentless in their efforts to bore makeshift glory holes in the bathroom stalls, particularly in the library. Some of the stall walls bore layer upon layer of riveted steel panels covering each successive puncture, like the hulls of sad, war-damaged battleships.
One such stall wall one day featured a list of instructions for initiating sex with the adjacent stallmate, which included something like “tap foot three times” and “put hard cock under stall.” Actually, I believe that was the entirety of the instructions. One was assumed to know how to take it from there, I guess.
This was something I’d never heard of, and as I strained to move my bowels as speedily as possible, I also essayed not to allow my foot to tap, which (somewhat ironically) was now a real possibility, nervous as I was about some strange penis appearing near my ankles as it responded to some unwitting summons of mine.
(I also felt some incredulity at someone’s ability to even perform such a maneuver, brief as the gap was between the bottom of the stall wall and the floor— but as I mentioned, these bathrooms were apparently patronized by some very dedicated hedonists.)
[disclaimer] I’m certainly not speaking for all of Lesbiandom. [/disclaimer]
The closest I’ve seen to “anonymous” lesbian sexual encounters would be at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. It has been going on every year for some 30 years now. “Festival Fling” is a familiar concept there, but only a fraction of the women who attend have such activities on their agendas. For an even smaller fraction, you might be able to consider certain sexual environments of the festival as the only item on their agenda. Some of these encounters might very well be completely anonymous, but I’d wager that names, phone numbers, email addresses, sexual histories, and STD test results are shared more often than not.
It makes me want to get a fake foot, with a different type of shoe on it than my own, and place it toe-to-toe with my foot up against the divider between me and the next stall. Maybe I’ll tap it occasionally, or just make it shudder and rock back on its heel. I’ll make sure to time the movement with the grunts of accomplishment from the guy a couple stalls down on the opposite side.
If this is all there is to your hypothetical politician, then what’s wrong with him is that he has not explained his position sufficiently. I want to know why he opposes the things he opposes.
If, for instance, he opposes same-sex marriage because he believes that it will set off a chain reaction that will end with Godzilla destroying Tokyo, then what’s wrong with him is that he’s a raving loony.
I still might be willing to vote for the guy, however, simply beacuse he’s given a speach that includes the phrase “I like the big meaty cock.”
Nothing, if he also opposes mixed-sex marriage and mandated mixed-sex DP schemes. If, however, he is in favor of MSM and/or mandated MSDP then whether or not he is a hypocrite is irrelevant to the fact that he’s a bigot. There is no rational basis (in either the legal or general sense of the term) for denying marital rights to same-sex couples while allowing them to mixed-sex couples so by definition opposition to same-sex marriage that is not accompanied by opposition to mixed-sex marriage is bigotry, and I see no need for any more bigots in government.
Of course they would. His seat is safe for any Republican except him. Why risk the seat running someone with potential “issues” when they can run any other warm body and safely retain the seat?
That makes sense. There’s not, in other words, some special responsibility as a gay man he has to support these initiatives. Any person with those beliefs is a bigot under those circumstances; he carries no special weight as a gay man.
I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. Most supporters of same sex marriage (such as myself) take as basically an article of faith that people who oppose same sex marriage basically never have anything approaching an actual legitimate logical reason for their opposition, and are just bigots. (To be a bit more precise, I think many “normal” opponents of same sex marriage start with a huge ooh-that’s-gross-factor, and then convince themselves of the legitimacy of various spurious anti-gay-marriage-arguments in order to not feel like the bigots that, at some level, they generally are.)
Thus, a gay man who was opposed to same sex marriage would have to work very hard to convince me that he was not at some level self-hating, which seems somewhat unhealthy.
To put it another way, someone who is ooged out by gay sex and thus opposes gay marriage is someone who fears the different, which, while in this case greviously wrong, is an all-too common human reaction, and one I can judge and evaluate and deal with. Someone who engages in gay sex but is also ooged out by gay sex… well, that’s just messed up.
Well, no moral obligation, anyway. I think it’s pretty stupid to work against yourself like that, but hey…if someone wants to be an idiot for the sake of power (and try to drag all the rest of his co-orientationists along with him), bless his shrivelled-up pruney little heart…
At that point, it becomes OUR responsibility to try to limit the damage they can do. A situation like this is one of the few circumstances in which I wholeheartedly approve of the outing of public figures. It’s self-defense at this point.
I have met two gay men who vocally opposed same-sex marriage. One, an Ayn Rand-type objectivist, opposed all recognition of marriage by the government; he felt, basically, that the government had no business in legitimizing personal relationships of any stripe.
The other offered what was more of a practical than a fundamental objection: he supported it in principal, but believed that pushing for it would create a backlash. He felt it was damaging to the ultimate cause to voice support for it now, and believed the better tactic was to seek same-sex civil unions now, and same-sexmarriage later, after people saw that civil unions didn’t cause the universe to implode. He felt that people “on his side” that didn’t see the truth of this proposition were as damaging to the cause as right-wing fundamentalists.
Most of us who support gay marriage do so primarily because it’s a matter of justice and equality to us. There IS a secondary reason, though, and because it’s one that the opponents of gay marriage try to use against us, we don’t talk about it THAT much. It’s simply that when gay marriage becomes commonplace, that’s one more life experience that we share with straight people, another point of similarity and normality.
I’ve posted before about my opposition to the “sweep the weirdos under the rug…we’re all normal just like you!” attitude in the gay community (in reference to pride parades and the like). While I don’t think it’s wise or desirable to oppress our own people in order to “pass” as “normal”, I also think it’s wise and desirable to play up the similarities to straight people as much as possible. And things like gay marriage and non-discrimination do that very well.
I think the point, for me, about the Craig thing is that if Sen. Craig had a couple of ounces more courage, none of this would have been a problem. Of course, he’d never have become a Republican senator from Idaho, but he’d probably be a LOT happier than he is now. Or really has been for the last thirty or forty years, maybe.
In my opinion, his behavior (and the behavior of many gay men) is due to the fact that they cannot be themselves in our society. The banning of gay marriage is a symptom of a bigger problem. So is glory hole-cruising. While there may be some people who do it for the rush, I think cruising is done often because it is “bad” to be gay in America. This guy is obviously so ashamed of himself (probably partly due to religious or societal mores) that he cannot admit to himself or anyone else that he’s gay. Just my dimestore psychological profile.
But don’t both of these opinions assume that their short-term behavior (not supporting the current “gay marriage” movement) will contribute to an eventual equal playing field for homosexuals and heterosexuals, with or without government recognition/sanctioning/tax exemptions, etc?
