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'Skeeter Bites Chews on Foleygate
Queer Town Meeting: Community in So. Vermont
Views from Vermont:
'Skeeter Bites Chews on Foleygate
by Skeeter Sanders
The
following is an excerpt from The 'Skeeter Bites Report. To read the entire
column, please go to skeeter-bites.blogspot.com.
Disgraced former Representative Mark
Foley (R-Florida) said through his lawyer in early October that he is
"a gay man," days after revelations that he exchanged sexually
explicit Internet instant messages with teenaged male Capitol Hill pages.
But contrary to attorney David
Roth's vehement assertions to reporters that his client "is absolutely,
positively not a pedophile," a mounting body of evidence is emerging
that the 52-year-old Foley has a pedophilic, rather than homosexual, orientation.
While many who knew Foley had
assumed for years that he was gay, they are only now coming to the realization,
as the scandal unfolds, that the former six-term congressman never demonstrated
behaviors indicative of being attracted to adult males.
Nor has anyone, to date, come
forward to say definitively that Foley is, or has ever been, in a relationship
with an adult male, despite a recent Los Angeles Times story in which
a former page said he had a sexual liaison with Foley in 2000 at the age
of 21, after he left the Capitol Hill page program.
While this has often been a
tactic taken by closeted gay men in positions of power and influence,
none of the individuals that this blogger spoke with said they could recall
Foley even dropping the most subtle of hints that he had any interest
at all in adult gay or bisexual men.
Yet Foley has on several occasions
publicly expressed a deep affection for the young pages - with C-Span
cameras even capturing Foley becoming unusually emotional during a speech
honoring them on the House floor.
The Foley scandal is giving
the Republican Party tremendous grief with its most staunchly loyal constituency:
Christian conservatives. At the same time, however, Foley is becoming
a pariah in the gay community, which bitterly resents conservatives' longstanding
assertions associating gay men with pedophilia.
[...]
The fact that Foley resigned his House
seat and claimed days after the fact - through his lawyer - that he's
gay is in sharp contrast to Representatives Gerry Studds (D-Massachusetts),
Barney Frank (DMassachusetts) and Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona). They publicly
came out of the closet without guilt or shame - and not only stayed in
office, they easily won re-election. Kolbe decided in February to retire
at the end of the year.
Even former Representative David
Clarenbach (R-Wisconsin), who waited until after he retired from Congress
in 1995 to come out, nonetheless did so with dignity and grace - even
introducing his longtime companion to reporters. Four present and former
members of Congress - two Democrat, two Republican - came out of the closet
as gay men at various times in their lives without any guilt or shame.
Three of the four went on to win re-election. And all four have longtime
adult male companions.
Skeeter Sanders is a former freelance journalist living in Plainfield.
This excerpt was reprinted with permission.