It’s possible to be bisexual but still feel a strong need for connection with a specific gender, and I don’t think it’s all that rare. It may be that people find it easier to identify as straight or gay when that’s the case.
[Holds up a defiled raw chicken] Hear! Hear!
Now we’re assuming he has STDs, because…? Let’s keep the discussion within observable facts.
Ted Haggard is a major source of entertainment for me. He rails against the gayness, but he is, in truth probably a little bit gay himself. Fun all around. But there’s no reason to suddenly claim he has STDs.
Fuck Ted Haggard, and not because he’s gay.
I have a cousin that was sucked into his cult of a church, and it’s pathetic. She has a college education, but quit her job to work for the church (hubby does this as well, also tossing his degree). They depend on “donations” from God (which means their parents) to keep their message alive. The best part is that this ponzi scheme of a religion takes a cut from the top and whatever is donated is watered down when it reaches my cousin. Which would be fine with me if the money was actually going to good use. She uses it for vacations, manicures, and anything else she deserves. I do love getting my monthly letter begging for funds, though. Did you know that if you have a leak in your bathroom that it’s actually Satan that’s entered your home?
I say fuck him and his wife for trying to cling to the church for the money. Of course he’s gay. Who cares? The looney tunes in his church, that’s who. But he’s not really gay, he just has some “male attachments”. What the fuck is that? The killer for me is that at the end of the interview, the church took this hypocritical prick back. I don’t know why, but I guess it means that all of the leaders have a skeleton or two in their closet, so forgiveness is the order of the day.
What a dick. He rails against homosexuals, and when caught, he says Jesus died for people like him. And he’s just fighting his demons. Meanwhile, after the show, he’s going down on a cameraman (ok, I made that up). He’s not sorry for being gay. He’s sorry for getting caught.
His wife is pathetic. I really feel bad for the children, and the homosexual community, who now has this jackass as a member who is spouting the “it’s an urge I must control” nonsense. ASSHOLE! (Kevin Kline, A Fish Called Wanda)
SFP
Valete Vox Sox in Box
I’m gay, and my “gaydar” is amazingly accurate. I don’t know what it is, but I can just tell. And it picks up “bisexual” very differently from “gay.”
A number of years ago, I was channel-surfing, and happened to catch about a minute of Ted Haggard. I had never heard of him or seen him anywhere, but my gaydar was virtually jumping up and down and pointing emphatically. There was no question whatsoever. So now, I watched the Oprah interview, and I have to admit Oprah did a fair amount of confrontation, though I would have gone a lot further. But what I got out of the interview is that this is a gay man who is doing a great deal of deliberate lying, to himself and others. This is very different from mere “denial.” This guy knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s being very manipulative and hypocritical and dishonest. And his family is doing a lot of enabling.
True, but I think at some point, if that need is strong enough, “bisexual” stops being a meaningful descriptor. You can be bisexual and have a preference for one gender, but the story Ted’s putting out is that he couldn’t help but have sex with men, which suggests that his attraction to men is strong enough to put him outside the “bisexual” category.
I’ll add that if he is bisexual, and sympathy I have for the man evaporates. He loses the “forced to live a lie” excuse, because he was perfectly capable of having a happy, fulfilling life with his wife. He was just fucking guys because he’s a selfish prick who wanted to get his rocks off, not because he was seeking an emotional and physical fulfilment that was denied to him by the society in which he was raised.
Well, he seemed to care an awful lot about other people’s sexuality when he was making heaps of money being Mr. Hateful Preacher Man, so I’m not feeling a great need to now respect his privacy. Once it comes out that you’ve made your career not just being a professional bigot but in fact a professional hypocrite, you don’t have much of a claim to any of that anymore.
I knew who Ted was, but had never seen a picture or seen video of him. Yesterday, I flipped past some show that was showing a clip of an upcoming HBO documentary. My wife and I watched about ten seconds of some guy going on about how great sex between two evangelicals was and we both asked why that gay man was babbling about it. Turns out it was a clip of Ted back in his heyday.
I still disagree. If this is true, then why aren’t all bisexuals are obligated to have straight relationships because doing otherwise upsets people? And if he were bisexual, it could be he was really into the hustler guy, and it wasn’t a conflict of gender preference but person preference.
I’m not sure how that follows from what I posted. I don’t think anyone’s obligated to have straight relationships just to make other people happy. I do think that people are obligated not to cheat on their spouses. Qadgop suggested that Haggard deserves some sympathy, as he’s spent his life trying to fulfil a role (happily married heterosexual) in which he can’t possibly be happy (because he’s really homosexual). If he’s bisexual, then he is, in fact, capable of fulfilling that role, and his infidelity is downgraded from Brokeback Mountain-style tragedy to garden variety sleeping around.
That’s true: I hadn’t considered that possibility.
Though it still wouldn’t justify cheating. I do feel badly for the guy either way – he’s not living in a context where having feelings for another man is acceptable even if he doesn’t act on them, and that creates suffering and tension. I do agree with you that it’s different to cheat when you’re desperate for any kind of real romantic connection than when you have some but want some more or different.
Stink Fish Pot
Exactly. Thank you.
But he chose to live in that “context.” In fact, he promoted it, and he bears responsibility for it.
I don’t know much about him. I know that I didn’t choose to be raised religious, or to find myself later ensnared in a complicated mental trap as a result which left me believing God wanted me to be straight. I did make my own choices. I’m responsible for the horrible divorce and assorted agonies that resulted from this terrible mistake in cognition on my part. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum, and while Haggard is surely accountable for his actions, I still see him and his family as also being victims of the toxicity of religion.
Do you really think that if he had been raised by atheists, Haggard would be any less sleazy? He might not end up being a religious fundie who got off on persecuting others, but he’d no doubt still be sleazy.
The honorable thing for him to have done, once the scandal broke, was to go quiet and stay quiet, simply to save his children and his wife the agony of the public eviscerating he gets whenever he rears his head. He didn’t do that, though. He loves the spotlight, and the power and influence which comes from it, too much to give it up, no matter what the cost.
It can be both, and I think it is. He can be sleazy and still in part victim (and perpetrator) of religious poison.
I still feel a little sorry for him. When his livelihood is wrapped up in railing against what he is ,the self loathing has to be crushing. His distortion of religion for his own personal gain ,had to be mind twisting. He is gay. He covered it up for as long as he could.