Update: When I wrote this, over a week ago, I honestly had no idea there was a closeted gay predator on Capitol Hill. But I can’t say I’m surprised.
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Let me start this week by saying I’m straight, married, happy with myself, but that my best friend in college was gay. His coming-out changed me, because I still loved him afterward.
Still do.
History tells us that gays who are honest with themselves, and others, pose little threat to society, no matter how much some hate groups may disagree.
Closeted gays, on the other hand?
Very dangerous. That makes this an issue for straights as well as gays. Finding, naming, shaming, and preventing evil are in everyone’s interest. Self-hating, closeted gay people do tremendous damage. Self-hating closeted people no matter what their trips cause tremendous damage.
Back when I was young the best example of this was Roy Cohn (above). Cohn was Joe McCarthy’s chief lawyer. He came up at a time when to come out meant to lose everything you had. He was a bully. While his homosexuality was an open secret, and he even went to gay bars in the 1970s, he never admitted to the AIDS which killed him in 1986. His life was fictionalized in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
He was an archetype. He hated himself and so practiced hate on others. Pretty good definition of evil in my book.
Which brings me to this, a piece by former RIAA head Hilary Rosen about former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey , whose tell-all book is being panned by many gays because, while in the closet, Jim did bad things.
Perhaps no one is more responsible for setting this world on the
current course of its copyright wars than Hilary Rosen. It was Rosen
who set the RIAA dogs loose, Rosen who helped push through the
one-sided DMCA and NET Acts, Rosen who called everyone who copied
someone else’s CD a "pirate."
After leaving the organization, she became a gay activist.
I don’t know how "out" she was with the RIAA. Her Wikipedia entry says she left the group to spend more time with her partner, Elizabeth Birch, who left her job with Human Rights Watch at the same time.
"Most Americans really don’t care who is gay and who isn’t" Rosen writes in a piece about reports Karl Rove’s father is gay. Really?
Not really.
Some of the most dangerous people in America today are closeted gays,
and we don’t know who they are (although in some cases we have our suspicions . Both sides are half-assed in their approach to this reality. Conservatives attack any liberal rumors that one of their number is closeted.
Liberals take a guilty pleasure in the exercise, caring more about the
hypocrisy than the reality. The reality is that many of the people
trying to push gays in the closet are gay themselves. And anyone
engaged in such an exercise should be confronted with a demand they
prove something they can’t – what’s in their heart.
Gay people have even more trouble with this than I do. Some insist on "outing," with an emphasis on those with anti-gay records.Others have problems with it because, well, how your heart feels should be a private matter.
The reality is this. Lying about who you are is a bad habit. It leads
to mor
e lying. And lying is a slippery slope toward the greatest evils
man can conjure, a sort of marijuana of evil.
Are there evil straights? God yes. Maybe 9 in 10 evil people are
straight. (It’s estimated 1 in 10 are gay, so that’s how I come up with the estimate.) We should also talk about what drives them, and shame them
out of our lives that way.
Betcha that, in nearly all cases, there’s something. Let’s see what it
is, and let’s start with every asshole in this country who excuses
torture.
Out Everybody.
