GLAAD: Pay No Attention to the Rest Stop Sex

Yesterday, the NYTimes ran a high-profile Metro piece on parking-lot cruising in the city's Long Island boroughs. Andy Towle thought it was "sensationalist piece of trash," but that didn't stop him from printing an extensive excerpt. And now our friends at GLAAD have gotten into the mix, calling upon their drones action-alert subscribers to denounce the article's "sensational language, lurid tone, and reliance on anonymous sources" that "drag the Times far beneath its usually high journalistic standards." (Notice the sycophantic flourish at the end; it always hurts worse when your media friends turn against you.)

I thought the article was brilliant reminder that queer sex is both indominatable and none-too-legitimate. In the rush towards state-sanctioned marriage and the utopian visions of gay equality, it doesn't hurt to acknowledge the seedy, underground demimonde that society has always reserved for those of us "in the life." Respectability may be a fine goal for upright citizens the likes of Ben and me -- and comes naturally to most of our friends, straight and gay. But life rarely fits into neat little politically-correct patterns championed the propagandists at GLAAD. (I have zero doubts that the Times article was truthful.) Maybe non-comformity should be celebrated as a good thing, rather than condemned.

(Can you tell I've just read Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis, Maria McCann's As Meat Loves Salt, and Camille Paglia's Vamps & Tramps back to back?)