You make an important point. Some of us regard public restrooms as places to quickly and privately take care of rather unsavory duties. When I’m doing such duties, I’m not inclined to party, and I’m not looking for help or a consultation. No one should have to tell another adult: “Don’t f—k with me when I’m taking a s—t.” Such admonishments should be unnecessary in civilized society.

I like to regard Craig’s trespass as yet another facet of the Republicans’ campaign to deprive us of our rights and privacy. When they’re not provoking wars, rounding us up, reading our mail, or listening to our phone calls, we might find them creeping under the bathroom stalls. They can’t help themselves and they can’t stop. It’s just how they are. Tell your friends.

David Ehrenstein in the LA Times:

In short, never has the admonition “Get a room!” seemed more apropos. It’s up to the I’m-not-gay(s) to discover the real freedoms fought for and won by the people they so fiercely claim they’re not.

Seriously, CD, we’ll make a WASP out of you yet [dodges zucchinni].

Digby also makes an interesting point (the context is Tucker Carlson’s pathetic little story; see the whole post):

if Carlson and his high school pal, whom he allegedly left the bathroom to find and then came back to assault this gay man, did this as a result of the guy “tapping his feet” on the floor and sliding his foot under the stall divider, as Larry Craig admitted to doing, then Tuckie knows a hell of a lot more about gay cruising signals that the average straight fellow. I asked my husband if he would have had a clue what it meant if someone did that and he didn’t know what I was talking about.

When the “signals” are that obscure, only the people who are in on the code know what’s going on. Everyone else just thinks it’s some guy sliding his foot around weirdly and tapping his toes while he sits on the toilet and they don’t respond. The guy moves on to someone who knows the code and responds that they are interested.

In other words, if Tucker is picking up these signals as a gay come on, then he’s far more clued in to the gay world than any straight guy, except maybe a cop, would normally be.

There is evidently a very deliberate and complex signaling that goes on that someone who wasn’t clued in would never get, much less be offended by, because it requires that the target respond in a certain way before it goes to the next step (as the cop in the case did.If someone does feel weird about these signals they are easy enough to repel. Obviously, the reason they are so tentative and obscure is in order not to cause a disturbance.

Still, I’m with CD. A public bathroom is an icky enough place without people doing all this coded stuff, which now all the world knows.

This whole story reminds me of the famous (perhaps apocyphal) book review: “This book tells you more about penguins than you would ever want to know.”

Then again, it is funny, isn’t it, how much Conservative communication is coded, isn’t it? Somebody needs to write an article called, oh, “From the Tea Room to the War Room,” showing semiotic parallelism between coded messages from cruising Conservative gays and dog whistle messages to the base. Talkin’ ’bout you, Ken Mehlman…

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

My Uncomfortable Experience in a Public Mens Room
by kharma

Two weeks ago, the kids and I went on a trip to visit friends in San Antonio, Texas. On the way we stopped at a rest area just off the interstate. What happened next made me very uneasy…

I was drinking coffee heavily so that I would stay awake and needed to relieve myself pretty badly. I pulled into a rest area, locked the car doors, left the kids sleeping in the car, and went into the restroom. When I entered I noticed it was unoccupied except for a pair of sneakers visible under the second stall.

As I unzipped at one of the urinals and began to relieve my burning bladder I heard a voice say “Hey, what’s up?”. I looked around and there was no one else in the restroom. After a moments hesitation, I answered “Not much”.

A little time went by and he says, “What ya doing?”.

I didn’t feel very comfortable talking to someone in a stall but I didn’t want to be rude and answered, “Uh…we are heading to San Antonio to visit friends.”

“Want to come over?”, he says.

At this point I am really uncomfortable and I finish up and scoot over to the sink to wash up. “No I don’t think so.”, I replied. Wow, was this something else. I had never even had someone next to me with a wide stance before and now I’ve got someone in the stall asking me over!

As I reached for the paper towels to dry my hands I hear, “Hey man, can I call you back? There’s some asshole in the bathroom answering every thing I say.”
ba dum dum!

Somebody had a quote Craig gave (quite awhile back; this was on teebee as I was passing through a room so don’t have exact attribution) that said something like “I don’t do [gay] stuff like that and if I did it sure wouldn’t be in Boise Idaho! Jiminy!” (I remember the “Jiminy” specifically as it is such an eye-rollingly sissy-boy euphemism).

But it got me thinking: When you’re going to go the closet route through life, AND you’re going to be in the most-scrutinized public position possible, “getting a room” is just not an option that is available to you. You must have a situation in which you (1) get your rocks off while (2) your face is never seen, voice is never heard, nothing about you is identifiable later.

Boise, indeed all of Idaho, is right out. Small state, your picture is everywhere, there isn’t a crowd big enough to get lost in. He could have gotten away with one of those “fishing trip with the boys” scenarios which would cause wink wink nudge nudge but is within the cultural setting enough to scrape by.

But when you’re a gay-bashing Republican this becomes less plausible since there is never anyone you can trust not to out you, or threaten to (blackmail), or do so inadvertently (bragging to others about their brush, ahem, with celebrity).

An anonymous bathroom encounter in a state far enough away that they have no clue who you are —can you name, and would you recognize by face, the senators from the state next to the one you live in? I could not—was as best I can tell, after your run the copulation calculus, the best choice he had, very possibly the only choice, when the pressures of celibacy became too great.

I don’t agree that Tucker is in on some secret lingo. He just happened upon some aggressive guy and probably made the mistake of eye contact or talking in a restroom. I doubt he witnessed foot-tapping silent code, but rather the one-on-one treatment of some aggressive bathroom creep.

I did some late night drive across the country trips, and I dreaded stopping at those smaller rest stops. Such creepy creepy sh*t goes on. It’s more dangerous than inner city gangs flashing their headlights at you if you “answered” back. Good luck trying to get 20 minute nap with weirdos circling your car.

there are lots of closeted republicans, in DC and everywhere. lots. and the truth is that you’ve got to do something “really out there,” over and over again (foley) and still- it’s likely that you won’t be outed. not in the SCLM, although the blogs are working hard to make up for this, the Code of Closet Omerta is still too much in force. there was so much Queer in DC it blew me away, and over and over again, i found myself asking, “closet? what closet, these people are more out than i am.”

your point about smalltown gay life, well, again- sort of. there has always been various smalltown gay populations, and not all of them end up like matthew sheppard. i suppose ID is a riskier place to be gay, but this guy was a rich and powerful senator. all he had to do is pick up the phone, the beef he needed would’ve been delievered. discretely, if that’s the way he needed it.

he was poaching public spaces because they were public spaces, as AC points out- republican authoritarians just can’t help being twisted sexually as well as in every other way. this isn’t about needing cover in the closet, this is about the type of personality that plagues the republican party today. murderers, rapists and cronies flock together, and craig is no exception. this has nothing to do with being gay and everything about being an icky predator.

In a weird way, I think this is a good thing. It exposes people to a fact of life for many gay/bi/questioning/down low/whatever men. Because of the very policies people like Craig push, a sexual experience (and I guess indirectly an ’attraction’) can only happen in a place like a public toilet room. I think it really exposes the whole reason behind their strong emotional fight against gay people and anything where you are comfortable about having a good time…. it has to be ’dirty’ for it to be exciting to them. they are brainwashed as children into a religion where doing what you like is bad. so the more they like it the more they need to make sure it is really taboo. They need the STATE to declare it bad because they haven’t really been taught self control because they have been brought up with some God who tells them what to do, rather than they decide themselves.

I also like the fact that now men are discussing whether it is appropriate for women to go out and bring back a friend to bash you if you hit on them and they don’t like it (RE: Tucker’s pucker) and also if just tapping your foot or looking at someone ’wrong’ will get you arrested as if you were gay. I hope it makes them think a little of how alot of people actually do have to watch what they do in case they are found to be ’different’.

Oh, and I really love this.. I found this linked at Sadly No from some right wing site about other right wing sites’ support for Mr. Craig… i wonder if their heads will explode. Probably not, since they haven’t figured out that Adultery is mentioned numerous times explicitly in the Bible as a reason to kill someone, and a gay relationship is only implicitly mentioned 1 or 2 times and only if you misinterpret some Greek words in translation from ’prostitute at a shrine’ into ’homosexual partner’ and almost all the GOP candidates are adulterers.

>>Amazingly, Larry Craig’s arrest has prompted more than a few people to come out and imply or outright say that you should be able to legally use public bathrooms like a gay pick-up bar.

come out of the closet and register for a name, so we can continue this discussion while knowing each other in the Biblical sense.

what you said, and then some. titter. you’re right, the silver lining here is seeing all the “progressive” homophobes and closet authoritarians coming out to defend poor lil Larry. if this had been a str8 thing, the discourse/narrative would’ve been very different.