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A (potentially former?) staffer for allegedly Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) is making news for filming gay sex in the Senate hearing room. He also, allegedly, yelled "Free Palestine" at Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio).
I include the last sentence only to clarify the full context for a statement the staffer posted on his LinkedIn about the matter:
I'm struggling with his statement because it seems like the "filmed sex tape at work in the Senate hearing room on Amy Koobuchar's desk" is more of the issue here than the staffer's sexuality itself, but the language used insinuates that he is using his sexuality as a defense for an act that straight people also probably could not have "gotten away" with.
The utter lack of understanding of consequences is also throwing me a little bit. Culture war discussions about sexuality dip into accusations of degeneracy and pleasure-seeking not associated with, necessarily, love that this video emulates. This video will of course be used to further those accusations onto "all gays" instead of the particularly privileged ones who work in the Senate.
That seems pretty common, though. There is quite a bit of "but it's OK when straight people do it, bigot" directed at opponents of gay pride parades and the like.
Obviously the uncharitable explanation is that gay men are all perverts, but that's not the sort of thing that, well actually I guess it could be a quality contribution if you put enough effort into it, but it usually isn't and I don't particularly want to do it. It's also not a particularly interesting explanation. I think it's more productive to discuss what the charitable explanations are- not because I like gays, but because they're probably not all just evil, that's rarely a good model of anybody.
Instead I think there's an experiential gap. Gay male culture is simply accepting of things within itself(very public displays of sexuality, harassment-ish behavior, teen sex, extreme promiscuity, etc) which are controversial to verboten among straight people. I think that neither gays nor their straight allies are aware of both sides of this- gays that it's not considered acceptable to simulate sex in public in the straight community, straight allies that the gay community doesn't care about such things or understand why anyone would. And obviously that has relevance for gay pride parades- a bunch of straight people parading down main street doing the exact same things would get arrested for indecent exposure and public nudity, and I don't think the pro-pride-parades side is willing to acknowledge that. But it also has relevance for all sorts of other things; the gay stuff in schools is controversial, but sex ed was hot culture war when it was "sometimes when a mommy and daddy love each other very much....", too. And in the current case, waving identity about like a shield probably will not save his job, but it might allow him to get a job at some LGBT NGO or other, because there's just a big experiential gap about how big of a faux pas it is.
Last year I watched the movie Cruising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruising_(film)) from 1980 (well worth a watch if you haven't seen it, it's stylish, thrilling and unpredictable). The film concerns a serial killer active in New York's gay community, so to track him down Al Pacino goes undercover, spending night after night in leather bars and inhaling poppers. The scale of the perversion he witnesses (e.g. looking on with barely concealed revulsion as a man, lying supine on a table in the middle of a club, gets fisted by another man while a captive audience watches) affects him psychologically and makes it impossible for him to perform with his girlfriend.
I was telling my brother about the movie and he said "I reckon there are a lot of very mainstream progressive types who really believe that gay men and gay couples are no different than straight men and straight couples aside from the objects of their attraction, and if they knew the kind of sexual behaviour which was seen as completely normal in the gay community, they'd be horrified."
The film was criticised as homophobic both during production and upon release, to the point that gay activists tracked down where the location shooting was taking place and blew air horns nearby so that the audio would be unusable. Watching the film, I honestly wasn't sure why it inspired such ire. I don't think it's homophobic to correctly observe (as Cruising does) that promiscuity, casual sex and chemsex are extremely normalised in the gay community. Most straight people (and lesbians) have never had sex in a bathroom stall with someone they met ten minutes earlier and whose name they don't know - but if you were a gay man and you said you'd never done that, in my experience most gay men would look at you like you'd two heads.
The 22-year-old Onion article comes to mind: "I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth."
The median gay man could, if he so wished, live a life of sexual abundance and satisfaction that would be beyond the wildest dreams of at least a 95th percentile heterosexual male in attractiveness. Having sex in a nightclub bathroom with an attractive stranger is the highlight of your life; for me, those are Tuesdays. This was a concept I put to use in the day, transitioning her group to a gay nightclub if I needed to shake-off the gay friend(s) of a girl I'm trying to bang.
It's not uncommon, nowadays, in various spheres of the internet to see young straight men wishing they were gay, both ironically and unironically and anything in between; as well as gay men of varying ages gloating and/or being relieved that they don't have to deal with and jump through hoops for women in romantic/sexual settings: "Look what they [straight men] need just to mimic a fraction of our power."
We may be at an interesting time where a greater percentage of young straight men wish they were gay than where young gay men wish they were straight.
I realize I'm a bit of an outlier when it comes to sex, but does this really appeal to many straight men? That sounds more like a nightmare to me and I didn't think I was that much of an outlier.
"Highlight of my life" is putting it too strongly, but there's no question that having sex in public adds a great deal of excitement, especially if the girl is attractive and you don't know her very well (especially especially if it's the first time you've met her).
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Are you forgetting the beautiful stranger part? I feel like you are thinking with the wrong head, which is to say your actual head, which is not the head most men would think with in that kind of situation. Of course, most men will never be in that situation too, which only increases my belief they'd do it, because they know they won't get another chance.
No, the stranger part is the biggest reason it's not appealing to me.
I'm sorry if this is inappropriate, but do you not think that might be an outgrowth of the fucked up things that happened to you in prior relationships with women? The way I viewed the hypothetical - a proposition from a beautiful stranger that becomes the highlight of your life - we are talking about the kind of hot that short circuits critical thinking. Not knowing someone is usually not enough of a concern to cut through that.
(Edit: fuck I'm an idiot, there's also the possibility you didn't read the hypothetical that way, I'm sorry.)
It looks like I'm the outlier around here though, based on the other replies in this thread. Personally I think it's demographics based - we'd get a different response if the motte skewed younger, more progressive or richer/poorer.
Not OP, but maybe? Though I think it's more likely to be a result of attachment style in general -- I never had interest in casual sex even before I had trouble dating. While I certainly have insecurities that having sex with a stranger would prod at, I also value my relationships with other people very strongly, and I don't find any value in sharing something as intimate as sex with someone who I don't know.
Wait, like the sink? So just out in the middle of the bathroom, with not even a stall door keeping you away from just anybody being able to walk in? That makes the hypothetical more appealing to you?
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I’m with you on that. Hot girl looking to shag? I’ll do it anywhere she pleases. Doing it in a forbidden place is also hot and the kind of crazy story you’ll be able to score points with your peers on later (depending on your peers of course).
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Yes. You are an outlier.
To me, having sex with an attractive woman in a restroom, even in otherwise ideal circumstances, sounds like it would be at most 50% as enjoyable as the same encounter on a bed or a couch.
Should I start identifying as a demisexual?
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Huh. I'd expect it to be the sort of thing that's a 'fantasy' more in the porno sense than the 'would actually do personally if the opportunity knocked' one. Leaving aside longer-term issues like sticking your dick in crazy, and assuming that it's the woman's knees that are going to suffer from tile, there's a lot of pragmatic arguments for the discerning exhibitionist casual-sex seeker to head almost anywhere else (up to and including the proverbial Volkswagen Bug from Clerks).
The same for me, if we magically assume that no bad consequences will happen, then "nightclub bathroom" alone would be massive negative.
I can find worse places and situations, but almost anything else would be better.
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Generally speaking, I think the hypothetical seems unappealing to a straight man because the kind of woman who would agree to this kind of scenario can, with high probability, turn your life into a nightmare.
If we magically assume that no bad consequences will happen, then "nightclub bathroom" alone would be massive negative for me.
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Actually, the hypothetical is unappealing to me because it's fucking in a literal restroom and not, like, on a bed or something.
Plus I like to cuddle afterwards.
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