2007 Gay/Straight Story of the Year: Larry Craig -- Tapping Into the Inner Truth

Straight Guy,

You straights can keep Larry Craig, cover boy for our Gay/Straight Story of the Year. He's one of yours. As he's so happy to remind us all.



I know that the thrill of being caught in a sexual act is a turn on for folks, both gay and straight, male and female. And, if you're a closeted man, a public restroom might seem like a logical place to try to get your groove thing on. But I just can't connect the dots. Every sexual act or fantasy I've ever had has involved getting more comfortable, not less. I can't imagine myself spreading out, any part of me not fully clothed, on a tile floor that, if I was lucky, had fairly recently had a dirty mop dripping with filthy water slopped over it. Am I supposed to fluff up an industrial-size pack of toilet paper rolls from the custodian's closet to make a pillow?

The part of my imagination that gets stirred up by the sexual possibilities of the men's room are completely practical in nature. How old are those telephone numbers? Are they even from this decade? If I call one, will I further anger some angry woman in a terrycloth robe and curlers? If I connect with the voice on the other end of the phone, I am walking into a bashing or public humiliation? How can anyone write so small and so neatly to leave a legible telephone number in grouting? And, what the hell kind of tools does someone use to make a 3-inch-diameter hole in a granite slab between two stalls? Didn't anyone in the library think the noise was kind of suspicious?

Mostly, I can't figure out why someone with as many frequent flier miles as Craig surely must have had to use the public men's room at the airport. Isn't there some kind of nice little club with a bar, those cute little round soaps, and real hand towels?

Truth be told, I've felt a bit sorry for old Larry and his (apologies to Tony Orlando and Dawn) knock-three-times-on-the-stall-wall-if-you-want-me internal havoc. He really a victim of over-zealous prosecution, right? I mean he didn't touch anyone. He didn't show any of his parts -- save finger tips. And, he found out just how nasty his fellow Republicans can be. Stripped of his committee, slammed with ethics charges.

But just when I am tempted to have some compassion for Craig and his family, I make myself remember his voting record, his wide stance of humanity: "Yes" to a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, "No" to expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation, "No" to protecting job discrimination by sexual orientation. He built the gap that he fell in to. He built the stall wall.

Mr. Craig, tear down this wall! And, but as Tony Orlando and Dawn sang: Only in my dreams did that wall between us come apart ... Knock three times!!

--Gay Guy