When compared to most of the small group of 50,000-watt LGBT bloggers out there, Chris Crain can be counted on for contrary takes on LGBT issues of the day. Crain blogs at Citizen Crain and manages a very good gay news digest at GayNewsWatch.com. He is also a columnist and former editor of the Washington Blade.
His contrarian streak shows through in a column in this week's Blade as he takes on the brief flurry of blog coverage of the Richard Curtis affair in Spokane last week. (Revel in a sample that coverage in our special-edition Dick and Cody ticker.)
For different reasons, but like Matt Sanchez, Crain finds hypocrisy in the coverage of the Curtis affair by bloggers -- especially gay bloggers:
Only passing reference has been made by bloggers and their “amen” chorus of commenters to the felony unpleasantness that had befallen poor Rep. Curtis. Apparently the revelry isn’t as much fun if we’re reminded that the target of our snickers is himself the victim of a crime.
And fun is the theme here, especially for Dan Savage, the gay advice columnist who has made his entire career based on other people’s sex lives, though usually at the stranger’s (anonymous) request. “I spent the last hour wading through the 15 page police report. Holy crap!” Savage reported excitedly on his blog. “Curtis, hoping to keep this whole thing quiet, called the police himself. And when the police asked him what happened, Curtis told them everything.”
Isn’t that hilarious? For all we know, Curtis is the victim of blackmail, but it’s a real knee-slapper how Savage and company have picked up right where the blackmailer left off, exposing every private sexual detail they can get their hands on, and with giddy commentary to boot.
It is certainly true that most bloggers gave short shrift of the original outlines of the story -- Castagna's alleged extortion, but that's mostly because the blog-cosmos was late in picking up the story. The initial reports on Monday from Spokane media, led by KXLY and KREM TV, emphasized the extortion case. But it was Curtis himself who changed the nature of the story Monday afternoon with his declaration to the editor of The Columbian, "I am not gay. I have not had sex with a guy.”
Crain, to his credit, caught onto the story earlier than most of the bloggers outside of Washington. But that was long after the quick-release story broke on Monday. In GayNewsWatch, he picked up on the story on Tuesday -- a day after it broke, running with a second-day wrapup by KXLY under this GayNewsWatch headline:
Anti-gay GOP rep is target of gay escort blackmail
In his column, Crain says
Gay bloggers had a field day, giving us permission to revel in every salacious detail of this private, consensual sexual encounter because Curtis is “very anti-gay,” as one gossipmonger put it. In blogger-speak, that means Curtis voted against two gay rights bills, though no one has yet produced homophobic rhetoric or evidence he played a leadership role on the issue.
His own site used the description "Anti-gay GOP rep" as a shorthand headline description of Curtis in its first report, but once the police report was released with its luxuriant details of that night in Spokane, the headline shorthand in GayNewsWatch changes:
Accused denies blackmailing GOP lingerie lawmaker
Cross-dressing GOP lawmaker resigns House seat
Cross-dressing lawmaker: 'I am not the criminal here'
Accused in cross-dressing blackmail denies charges
Doesn't it seem a bit like these headlines "revel in every salacious detail of this private, consensual sexual encounter" with their emphasis on "cross-dressing" -- or at least in one salacious detail?
Judging from the limited but still huge set of headlines picked up by the searches we used for our Dick and Cody ticker, Crain's GayNewsWatch uses the shorthand "cross-dressing lawmaker" almost as often as all other blog posts combined. It's odd, then, that he'd accuse other bloggers of reveling in that detail of the case.
But the strangest part of Crain's column comes from his decision to single out Savage's posts in Slog. This blog, in its new home here and at its original home, is not accustomed to defending Savage. He does that well enough all by himself. But singling out Savage in this context seems unfair.
Savage's feature on Curtis in The Stranger went to press at about the same time Crain's piece in the Blade, so neither of them could have seen what appears in the other's paper, but in his feature, Savage gives the story exactly the kind of detail that Crain singles him out for omitting in the Slog posts.
And not only did Curtis not act like any gay man I know, he didn't act much like a homophobe in the Washington State legislature.
"While Representative Curtis had an anti-gay voting record," Washington state senator Ed Murray tells me on the phone, "he was never an ideologue." Murray served in the Washington State House of Representatives with Curtis. Curtis sat on the transportation committee, which Murray chaired.
"He didn't seem driven by antigay stuff," recalls Murray. "He wasn't one of the jerks. He wasn't one of the members so obsessed about the gay issue that you started to wonder why."
Openly gay Washington State Representive Jamie Pedersen describes Curtis as "decent and kind" in an e-mail. He was one of two Republicans who, after the [domestic partnership] vote, came across the floor to shake my hand and congratulate me," Pedersen recalls.
"Mostly, the whole situation makes me sad," Pedersen adds. "For his family, for him, and for a world that makes people feel like they can't be who they are."
Savage also deals far better than the headline writers for Crain's GayNewsWatch with the issue of Curtis's cross-dressing:
"There is a class of heterosexual men called autogynephiles, who are sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women," Blanchard confirms. "They may act out this fantasy in various ways. One common way is to dress up as women and seek sex with men. It is not rare that they employ pornographic movie theaters for this purpose, although that strategy usually limits them to wearing brassieres or panties beneath their male clothes."
Which is precisely what Curtis did.
Slog, of course, is not The Stranger. The paper's blog specializes in quick reactions that usually have a notable lack of subtlety. But -- like us over here -- Savage was dealing with the story as it developed in strangely exotic detail during the course of Monday afternoon and Tuesday. And each detail in the report as it became known (and Savage quickly downloaded a copy to make sure it was known) seemed to contradict Curtis's sole public statement on the situation.
As David Postman pointed out only moments before Curtis's resignation from the legislature, the story about the extortion was briefly buried under the wealth of detail in the police report. But what really turned the story around on Monday and Tuesday morning was Curtis's odd interview with The Columbian's editor, following so quickly after he'd given contrary testimony to Spokane police.
Crain misinterprets the developing story when he complains, "A couple of votes on the wrong side of gay issues is all it takes these days to expose every detail of an elected official’s sex life to public dissection on the blogs."
That's not what it takes, or at least not what it takes in this situation. What it takes is a lie from a politician to "expose every detail of an elected official’s sex life to public dissection on the blogs."
Editor & Publisher caught the essential nature of the story with this headline:
State Legislator Gave Paper False Account of Gay Sex Incident
Curtis apparently did nothing wrong, and could well have been a victim of a serious crime. But he lied to his hometown newspaper about an essential element of the case. "I've never had sex with a guy," he said to the paper after telling a very different story to the police.
In politics, it's always the lie that seems to get them. Curtis found that out.
And one other detail: Notice that Crain, who always includes "former executive editor of the Washington Blade" in bio notes, calls Savage "the gay advice columnist who has made his entire career based on other people’s sex lives." The "former Executive Editor of the Washington Blade" doesn't mention that Savage was editor and is now editorial director (probably even Editorial Director) of a major metropolitan weekly -- two of them for his current position. He has "made his entire career" on more than just Savage Love.
