check out this April, 2005 story from NBC 10:

Philadelphia Police Department's vice squad told NBC 10 News that the managers at the store called them when they suspected illegal sexual activity was taking place in the bathroom on the second floor.
A sting was set up and conducted over five-hour period. Investigators said that a least 50 men came through the bathroom during that period of time, but police were only able to arrest 16.
FeedRoom

Marc,

If I were a gay man, I would not want to buy into that argument. It assumes too many things that I am not willing to accept. First, it assumes that only gay men proposition each other in this sleazy way (and doing this type of thing in a public bathroom is sleazy, IMO). Second, this argument accepts the notion that being gay is something to be ashamed of. I'm not willing to accept either as fact.

I'm not gay, and I don't know if Craig is gay or not. But if he is, I don't believe that he his representative of gay culture. I'm sure that most gays would think Craig's type of proposition was disgusting, whether he's gay or straight. I've been told that in-the-closet gays normally do these type of things; because they don't want anyone to know. Openly gay men don't have to do this.

If I don't know what I'm talking about, somebody please correct me.

I wonder if there are more gay Republicans than Democrats in Congress. It's very sad, but I can understand how standing against gays in politics helps closeted gays live with sexual desires they think are immoral. So there is another reason to do everything we can to erase the stigma of being gay...it will reduce the number of Republicans.

This reminds me of a similar kind of hypocripsy. When Jesse Helms was running for reelection Senate in, 1990 I believe, he made a big deal about the Corcoran Gallery having a Mapplethorpe retrospective with federal dollars. But Helms took a loose leaf folder of Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs with him on the campaign trail. He would tell his audience, "Now you women, step back, beacuse I have some pictures here that will offend you. But I want the men in the audience to see the kind of trash we are supporting with your money." And then his aids would pass around the photographs.

This showed the truth of the old joke, Democrats look at porn in the privacy of their homes, while Republicans get together in groups to look at it.

This was one of the most heartbreaking elections of my life. Helms beat Harvey Gantt, the former Mayor of Charlotte and just about the classiest politician I have ever known and worked for, by a few percentage of the vote. That was the year Helms ran a famous TV add of a pair of white hand throwing away a rejection letter and blaming that letter on affirmative action. Helms was down in the polls (and if I remember correctly, far enough down to beat the likely pro-Gantt bias in the polls) a few days before the election.

And, while I'm free associating, I should point out that Gantt won election as Mayor in Charlotte despite the fact that whites were about 65% of the electorate. I wonder if that has ever happened in a northern city. He lost his second bid for reelection because he had taken advantage of teh very progressive annexation laws in North Carolina and annexed large tracts in Mecklenburg County. Gantt won by a nice amount in pre-annexation Charlotte, but was overwhelmingly defeated in the areas he had annexed.

One of the most influential books I've read (I guess in terms of cultural knowledge) was an oral history of the Stonewall era I read in 9th grade. I made a project out of it, and learned for the first time the limits of my parents' liberalism.

Anyway, one of the many things I took from that book--along with an abiding and still-unfulfilled desire to summer at Fire Island--was shock at the anti-gay-sex sting operations cops used to mount at bars. Those policing practices fall squarely in a messy area of entrapment and conspiracy law that has historically been, as the Slate conversation Marc referenced recognizes, often deployed against unpopular groups in society.

Sure, public places shouldn't become "dens of blowjobs," and if there is really such risk of this, police should feel free to park themselves in plain sight to discourage it.

But yeah, I am hugely uncomfortable with police resources being used to have some officer sit for X amount of time in a bathroom hoping to play along with someone's pretty subtle request for consensual, non-paid sex acts.

Although I can get angry, still I can't muster up much sympathy for politicians with anti-gay political positions reaping some of the fruits of the culture and laws they help sow.

what the hell does this thread have to do with philadelphia?

sounds like this is one to keep an eye on not to start a movement on.

I do hope people think about what's wrong with the police activity that lead to Larry Craig's arrest.

And while I can't help thinking a bit about the kind of self-repression--or even self-torture-- that must lead an evidently gay man like Craig to take the political stance he does, we can go back to laughing at him.

I would say that I completely agree that persecuting this type of conduct is very disconcerting. Frankly, I think that all sex related "crimes" should be wiped off the books. But it is the fault of conservatives and republicans that we have such a sexually repressed culture where this type of persecuting of sexual "crimes" goes on. Sleazy? Yes. Criminal conduct? No. But guys like Larry Craig have to realize that when they create a sexually repressive culture, and get caught with their hands in the cookie jar (pun intended) and get burned by it, it is their own fault and the bed that they lie in (pun intended).

First, I hesitate to respond here because it's not really a Philly issue and also because the only time I have anonymous gay bathroom sex is with Ray Murphy, but I don't belong to other blogs so here's where it'll come out.

At first I was all too happy to watch this hypocrite (who I've heard was gay for years) get caught with his pants down. He clearly was no friend of the gay community (or the environment, labor, common sense, or other reality-based communities), so it was good to see him go down. But my feelings on this have evolved a little in the past few days that I've been following this story.

First off, I can't help but get increasingly pissed off at the Republican leadership who was very supportive of Sen. Vitter after he was caught sleeping with DC prostitutes. I'm pretty insulted that they're so outraged about this, when in reality, this was just Sen Craig making a pass at some cute undercover cop. I mean talk about blatant hypocrisy. Shouldn't Vitter have had worse treatment because he actually went through with it?

Second, and this pains me to type this, I'm starting to feel a little sorry for this guy. I mean who's fault is it that he's stayed in the closet his whole life, where he's relegated to this type of behavior? Yes, clearly there were out gay men of his generation that became gay civil rights heroes by coming out at a time when it meant drastic hardships (Frank Kameny was outed because of a public bathroom incident, but then went on to become a gay civil rights leader). I can't help but think that if we lived in a perfect world, Craig would never have been ashamed of his sexuality and he would have been a much happier person. My mother & father always tell me I'm too hard on closeted men, and I should cut them some slack because it's hard to come out and everyone's different (yes, my parents scold me on gay tolerance). Maybe they're right. Obviously Sen Craig could have grown some balls and come out, but I understand that's hard to do.

Finally, to what degree is the cop baiting men to start this action. If Craig tapped his foot, and the man in the stall next time him didn't do anything, then Craig wouldn't have continued his Morris-code of bathroom flirtations. Since the cop was flirting back, does that mean it's baiting? If that cop started flirting with me in the counter line at Quiznos and I flirted back, is that illegal? What about if he flirted with me in the bathroom at Quiznos, and I flirted back, does it make it criminal? Are we criminalizing flirting? I hope not, it's really my only game on a Friday night.

I don't know, I just have been uncomfortable with the media narrative on this, and I needed somewhere to type this out. Oh, and I was just joking about the only time I have anonymous gay bathroom sex is with Ray Murphy, it's just most of the time.

Well it seems that Marc and his McCarthyite tactics have driven Larry Craig from office