esrosedotblog

LETHAL CLOSETS

The Foley affair and the Haggard incident reveals a truth about conservative organizations; both political and religious.

That is the large number of men and women who staff these organizations are gay!

There is believed to be a high percentage of gay people staffing republican congressional staffs.

Many executive workers in evangelical church organizations are gay.

And all of this in secret. The closet walls are thick and the doors are very heavy.

These people hang out together and protect themselves.

Sometimes, a rumor breaks through the collective wall but this is quickly squashed.

Last week, Bill Maher outed Ken Mehlman, the retiring RNC chairman, on the Larry King show.

Not only did King refuse to believe it, CNN edited that portion out of the west coast edition and had YouTube remove the segments containing it.

Now, I do not know if Mehlman is gay or not but a lot of people in the blogosphere do. It has been a well known 'fact' for some time.

What does all this inner sanctum stuff do to the people involved?

Well, for one thing, it drives them to sublimate their desires.

I don't mean they don't have sex. I mean that they sublimate their desires to be free, open, proud gay men and women.

This leads to bizarre cries for help like the Foley thing with the pages; instant messaging for God's sake. When I was in college, an assistant Dean of Men was known to enjoy late night nude swims with various young men at the campus pool. A friend of mine went once. Nothing happened during the swim but there were more invitations and asides and unwarranted attention. He was a stalker.

The other manifestation of the closet is what Truman Capote called 'the killer fags'; the ones who used their power to punish other gay men or use homosexuality as a blackmail tool or, as in recent times, use homosexuals as political fodder.

Take a look at all those priests, bishops and (gulp) popes.

In political life, J. Edgar Hoover would be the exemplar. Roy Cohn, who died (secretly) of AIDS (and his own denial), another.

And we have the same thing today. Doing the same dance.

The closet kills the soul and as the soul dies, it reaches out to injure others.

A sad business.