David Johnson ( left ) and Lane Fenrich. Photo by Chuck Kramer___________
Chicago History Museum's Out at CHM series marked its fifth anniversary with a rousing discussion about gay sex and politics just days before Super Tuesday.
In 'Sexual Politics: From Lavender Scare to Larry Craig,' presented Jan. 31, historians Lane Fenrich and David Johnson talked about how sex—specifically gay sex—has entered the political discourse and been used as an effective tool over the years.
According to Johnson, gay sex started being used as a political weapon as early as the '50s. During the 1952 race for the presidency, rumors were spread that Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was gay.
Johnson is a history professor at the University of South Florida and author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government.
'Gender and sexuality [ were ] prevalent during the election,' Johnson said, calling it one of the 'nastiest' presidential campaigns to date. The Dwight Eisenhower-Richard Nixon ticket continuously dropped hints 'without saying outright he was queer,' Johnson said. Pamphlets referred to the Republican candidates as 'regular guys' who 'vote for morality.' A lot of attention was paid to the fact that if Stevenson became president, there would be no first lady, since he was divorced.
The 1952 election, Johnson said, established a 'long-standing political tactic of gay-baiting your opponent.'
It's a tactic that is continually used. In the 1956 presidential election, Eisenhower's campaign went so far as to say that a vote for Stevenson was a vote for transgender woman Christine Jorgensen, who was one of the first individuals to undergo sexual-reassignment surgery. The Eisenhower campaign bragged about ferreting out gays working in federal government. It continued in the '60s, when the John F. Kennedy and Nixon campaigns continued to emphasize masculinity and the perfect nuclear family.
'Gay-baiting continues to be a prominent tactic,' Johnson said. In the 2004 presidential election, moral values once again became a prominent issue. Johnson pointed out that a popular animated film watched online by more people than the presidential debates portrayed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and vice presidential candidate John Edwards as a gay couple, and hinted that they also posed a threat to terrorism. Kerry was continually linked to the Massachusetts gay marriage decision as well.
'This continues to have reverberations in 2008,' Johnson said, commenting on how Edwards was knocked by opponents for his expensive haircuts and that conservative political pundit Ann Coulter openly called him a 'faggot.'
Fenrich, an assistant dean of Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, opened by saying that 'hot, nasty man sex' appears to be a major theme that hasn't necessarily found its way into politics, but was put there by the LGBT community through organizing. 'We literally have changed the world' and the way people think about topics such as sex and marriage, he said.
Despite the community's great strides over the years, Fenrich said, the LGBT community has not been uncontested. He said that using gay sex as a political weapon in the '50s was merely 'part of culture' but, nowadays, the anti-gay movement that was created to counter the gay movement consciously uses it.
Much of Fenrich's discussion revolved around public sex among men.
'When we talk about sex and we talk about politics, we're talking about guys,' he pointed out. Fenrich said he couldn't think of a single example where conservatives used lesbian sex as a political weapon.
Conservatives and Republicans 'love' to talk about sex in 'delicious detail,' Fenrich said. They play on people's 'gross-out factor,' and use 'stories of nastiness' like Sen. Larry Craig's Minnesota airport bathroom debacle as 'warrants to deny gay rights.'
Spaces used for gay cruising, such as public restrooms, are not labeled as 'gay,' and people find this blurring of lines and boundaries as 'threatening,' Fenrich said.
'Larry Craig fits squarely into this pattern,' he said. Although studies on gay cruising show that it is highly unlikely unwanted touching would occur in one of these spaces, commonly known as tea rooms, there remains this fear and idea that these spaces pose a threat.
Studies show that many tea-room participants don't identify as gay, and most are conservative. Even though now that sodomy laws have been taken off the books and gay sex is legal, Fenrich said, gay public sex is still under scrutiny because 'these spaces aren't clearly identified as gay spaces.' They are indeterminable spaces where the heterosexual and homosexual binary remains unclear.
The mass media attention played to Larry Craig isn't the first time this has come into discussion. Fenrich reminded the audience that in the '90s, during the debates over whether or not gays and lesbians should be banned from openly serving in the military, media and public discussion continually returned to the example of the shower room. 'Although there were no reports of unwanted touching or sex, it was the idea of you don't know who is a member of the public' in those spaces,' Fenrich said.
Fenrich believes there has been a 'huge shift' in how the gay community handles the issue. During discussions about Larry Craig, very few LGBT people and organizations debated police entrapment. He said the community has found discussion of public sex 'embarrassing.' This is because conservatives know what they are doing, according to Fenrich. They have allowed sex to enter political discussion in order to use it as an example to deny rights to LGBT people. 'It has been wielded as such an effective weapon,' Fenrich said.