What bothers me and worries me most (well, beside the obvious ethical implications) about this Jim West (mayor of Spokane, Washington; made some homophobic remarks; was caught in a pretty intense gay sex scandal [offering jobs to gay men via online chat, hounding those men for dates, etc.]) is that I’m guessing after this all blows over, it will ultimately look worse for gays than for the hypocritcal republicans who pretend to be straight and then do really sketchy sexual things on the side. It’s like the priest thing — while the Catholic church has suffered some loss of face for letting the sexual abuse occur, I think in the end these types of things reinforce the idea that gay men are pedophiles and sexual predators who cannot be trusted. It seems that whenever there is a gay man in a postion of power (priest, politics, etc.), all we hear about is when he comes out of the closet after doing something really bad. The “openly gay” politicians are pretty benign so we don’t hear much about them doing good things.

I wish I knew what the solution would be. I don’t think, this time, that the problem necessarily rests on the media. I think it has more to do with oppressive organizations (e.g. Catholic church, republican party) forcing their members to adopt a lifestyle (i.e. straight) that isn’t them. The psyhcic torture of pretending to be someone else (Jim West: living “this double life has been hell”) causes these men to do really bad and inappropriate things.

The internalized homophobia and self-hate casues destructive behavior that causes these closeted gay men to make bad decisions. It isn’t a problem with being gay, per say, but homophobia.