It's a "Guy Thing", not a "Gay Thing"!

Public Sex Confidential

Overnight, senator Larry Craig became the poster boy for public sex. But as Benoit Denizet-Lewis reminds us, the phenomenon is anything but new -- and it's not just a closeted republican thing. So what is it that still drives some in the gay community out of the bedroom and into the Bathroom?

By Benoit Denizet-Lewis
From The Advocate January 15, 2008

Benoit Denizet-Lewis interviewed me on gay men and public sex. Here are excerpts from the article in the Advocate:

“Public sex is alive and well,” says Joseph Couture, author of Peek Inside the Private World of Public Sex.. “Authorities are becoming more creative and
effective at policing it, but horny men are very resourceful. You can have all
the gay marriage you want, but public sex isn’t going anywhere.”

Some assumed that the Internet would do away with the need for sex in the bushes.
After all, why leave the house when you can have your man delivered? Others
hoped that as American society became more accepting of gay people, fewer gay
men would engage in furtive, anonymous encounters. But websites directing men to
public sex places continue to be popular, universities are redesigning their
bathrooms to make them less conducive to cruising, and every month brings news
of police crackdowns like the one in Johnson City, Tenn., where 40 men were
arrested in 2007 for indecent behavior in area parks.

At least one mayor,
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.’s Jim Naugle, proposed drastic measures to deal with the
rampant “homosexual activity” in public restrooms. He wanted to spend $250,000
of the city’s money on self-cleaning robotic bathrooms designed with doors that
automatically open every few minutes, theoretically making sex inside them
impossible. Naugle noted that he prefers the word homosexual to the word gay,
because, he insists, most gay people are actually “unhappy.” Outraged, gay
activists began the “Flush Naugle’s Bigotry” campaign and encouraged people to
send rolls of toilet paper to the mayor’s office to help him “wipe his dirty
mind clean.”

So what explains the pull of public sex for gay men? Why do
some of us risk arrest, humiliation, gay bashings, and sexually transmitted
diseases in order to get off in the shadows?

It’s no secret that risk and danger are aphrodisiacs for many people and that public sex offers an adrenaline rush. But Kort, the psychotherapist, believes there’s a more powerful force to explain why some gay men spend much of their free time cruising public places for sex and why they regularly risk arrest to do so. One man cited in Tewksbury’s study, for example, had been arrested three times for cruising in the same park.

“What no one wants to really talk about is the role that sexual compulsion and addiction plays in this,” Kort says. “I would argue that a majority of men who regularly engage in public sex are either addicted to the rush, the escape, or the shame of public sex. Many gay men will go to great lengths to say that this is a behavior that they enjoy, that they want to be doing this, but if you probe deeper, they’re not happy. This isn’t an activity that makes them feel good about themselves, but they can’t stop doing it.”

Kort adds that many self-identified adult gay men mistakenly believe that by coming out of the closet, they got over whatever self-hate and shame they’d felt growing up gay in a straight world. Anonymous public sex, Kort says, is sometimes a way for gay men to play out shame and self-hate -- to essentially retraumatize themselves. “I call it returning to the scene of the crime -- the crime scene being our childhoods, where we were often degraded or humiliated for being different and where we were told hundreds of negative messages about how gay life is only about sex and how we’ll never find true love and don’t deserve a quality life,” Kort says. “The trauma of our childhoods get sexualized, and we express it at 3 a.m. on a cold night with a stranger in a park or in a rank bathroom along a highway.”

Books referred to in this article:

Gay men seek straight men in public restrooms

In an article appearing in the Advocate's year end issue by Benoit Denizet-Lewis From The Advocate January 15, 2008 entitled, Public Sex Confidential

Denizet-Lewis asks:

So what is it that still drives some in the gay community out of the bedroom and into the Bathroom?

And the article is a well-researched response to some of the reasons. One is how compelling it is for gay men to find straight men in public bathrooms:

One powerful motivating factor for many gay men seeking sex in public
places is the belief that they will find the ultimate sexual prize there:
“straight” men. You won’t bump into many married or self-identified straight
guys in gay bars, but you will find them in public sex places, where they
believe their anonymity is best protected, and where they can get
no-strings-attached gay sex without the hassle of having to actually talk to gay
people (many public sex encounters are done without exchanging a word).

“The reality is that gay men are tripping over each other in public
places to service the guys that carry themselves in the most masculine way
possible, the guys that they believe will then go home to their wives or their
straight lives,” says Joe Kort, a psychotherapist and the author of 10 Smart
Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives.

“Straight guys are the ultimate unavailable man, but for a few minutes
in the darkness gay men can have them. And for many gay men it’s the first time,
and the only real place, where they will feel seen, accepted, and validated as
sexual people by straight men. But in the context of public sex, it’s a twisted
form of validation.”

Undercover cops looking to arrest men engaged in public sex understand
that appearing straight carries currency in parks and bathrooms. Richard
Tewksbury’s study “Conversation at the Oasis” -- published in the March 22,
2007, issue of The Journal of Men’s Studies -- details the following
conversation between a cruiser and an undercover police officer on a park nature
trail:

Suspect: You come down here much?

Officer: This is my first time. I just heard about it on the
Internet.

Suspect: You’re a good-looking man.

Officer: Thanks. My wife thinks so too.

The study surveyed police records of 127 cases of public gay sex in a
California city between 1995 and 2005. Tewksbury found that awareness of the
potential for arrest “does not appear to deter cruising activity,” which might
explain why Couture and others don’t believe that Larry Craig’s arrest will keep
men from seeking out public sex. On the contrary, Couture says. “Thanks to good
old Larry Craig,” he tells me, “every man in the United States now knows exactly
how to go about getting sex in a bathroom.”

Larry King Live on Larry Craig and Sexual Addiction

Larry King's live broadcast Saturday September 1, 2007 featured my colleague Robert Weiss from the Sexual Recovery Institute. Rob authored the book which was stated on the Larry King show, "Cruise Control: Gay Men and Sexual Addiction".


Click here to read the full transcript of the show

The highlights of the show where Rob talks about sexual addiction are:

KING: Why would a United States senator with the problem risk it all in a public men's room?

WEISS: Shame and repression. Here's a guy who may have parts of himself that he doesn't want anyone to know about and he's going to go off on a secret place to act them out and hope that no one's going to find out he may have some compulsive or addictive sexual behaviors. Clearly, there's a part of him he doesn't like and doesn't want anyone else to know about.

KING: What do your patients tell you about the rush they get? What do they get out of this?

WEISS: The rush is about the possibility of getting caught, the excitement, a look in the stall and see who's there and maybe it will happen and maybe it won't. It is like an addictive experience, Larry. Sex addiction is like a gambling addiction -- the guy who gambles his kid's college fund even though he loves his kid. Here's a guy who loved his position, but he went and gambled it all in a sexual act.

Later he says:

WEISS: If I can just take it out of the political for just a second. You asked about feeling sorry for someone. I feel sorry for his wife. I really feel for this woman who stood by this man all these years and she's faced with a reality either that she didn't know about or didn't want to know about or kept to herself. Who does she talk to and turn to?

and

WEISS: Taking it a little bit out of the political, I wonder if he had been arrested for being sexual with a woman if this -- if he would have been abandoned as quickly and early. If he had been with a prostitute or --

WEISS: So if you think it's legal - and I say this to the guys I work with all the time, they say I've been entrapped or this shouldn't have happened to me. Go talk to your congressman and try to make public sex legal. But if it's illegal, the police have a right to prosecute. If I have a kid in the park and I want to take him to the restroom, I don't want to see two guys getting it on in there.

WEISS: Working with so many of the spouses as I do, I often hear that they blame themselves especially at the beginning. If I had been more attractive to him, if I had been more sexual with him and it's such a shameful issue for them to talk about for them and I'm sure for you.

And we know that nothing these wives have done or said could ever make their husband act out in this way.

Sex Addicts and straight men who have sex with men

As a sexual addiction expert over the past 22 years I have seen hundreds of men who have sex with men who are not gay. Sexual addiction causes its sufferers to go against their own will and do things that go against their own values.

The Larry Craig situation is bringing this into light through an article in the Washingtonpost.com article:

Tapping Into The Secrets Of the Stall
Experts Say Anonymous Sex In Public Places Is A Compulsive Behavior
By Lynne Duke and DeNeen L. Brown Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 30, 2007

Here are excerpts from this article that Straight Guise addresses:

Therapists also hear plenty about this world in the torment of their patients -- both married and gay men and those who eschew the word "gay" and describe themselves as "men who have sex with other men."

Whatever they call themselves, they are often driven by a craving, much like that which drives a drug addict, said Fred Berlin of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma at Johns Hopkins University.

"We use words like 'pervert' and we just demean and make very hard judgments," Berlin said. "What I found is that many of these people are hardworking and struggling hard to be in control. . . . Anybody can have a compulsion, whether it's a sexual compulsion or some other compulsion. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a measure of their character. Their character is something different."

And expert Eli Coleman who is a leading authority on sexual compulsivity had this to say:

"Some people are really compulsively driven to seek sex frequently, anonymously," says Eli Coleman, director of the human sexuality program at the University of Minnesota Medical School. They are often driven by the need to reduce anxiety and regulate their mood, to feel good temporarily, Coleman says.

"But oftentimes the behavior only gives short-term relief, and because of its furtive nature, they feel guilty and shameful and [tell themselves] they're not going to do it ever again, and then they're back out there."

An excellent resource on this topic is Patrick Carnes pioneering book, Out of the Shadows, on the topic, Rob Weiss' book for gay men and sexual addiction, Cruise Control, and I have a chapter about gay men and sexual addiction in my book, 10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do To Improve Their Lives.

Larry Craig: Is he gay, bisexual or a straight man who has sex with men (SMSM)?

If you have not heard by now Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom.

An associated press writer Todd Dvorak writer writes this:

Craig, 62, has faced rumors about his sexuality since the 1980s, but allegations that he had engaged in gay sex have never been substantiated. He has denied the assertions.

Why does the act of men having sex with men have to be labeled immediately as gay sex?

Gay is an identity not a behavior. To be a gay man describes a sexual orientation characterized by lasting aesthetic attraction, romantic love, or sexual attraction exclusively for others of the same sex or gender. To be gay man means that his thoughts, fantasies and behavior are in aligned. It is an identity based on affectional, emotional, spiritual, psychological and sexual feelings exclusively or mostly to men. Men who have sex with men in public places are not all gay or even bisexual.

Straight people do not want to believe that men can seek and have sex with other men unless he is gay or bisexual. They immediately dismiss all the reasons that are not about homosexuality because to believe otherwise means that any man is "at risk" for having sex with other men. This is intolerable in the homophobic times in which we live to most non-gay people.

But why are gays so quick to label Craig as gay? Perhaps Andrew Sullivan understands best when he writes:

Craig seems to have made a habit of voting against laws that would secure the rights of gay men and lesbians. In addition to supporting the Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, he voted against a bill that would have banned job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, against expanding the definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation, and was rated zero by the Human Rights Campaign in each of the last three Congresses (1, 2, 3; all pdf.) I truly can't imagine what it would be like -- how little self-respect a person would have to have -- to amass that sort of voting record while cruising for gay sex in airport restrooms.

We want to believe that only a self-loathing closeted homosexual would do this sort of thing. This would help make sense as to why someone would vote against gays and be so prejudice.

And this might be true.

But it also might be true that Craig struggles with sexual compulsions, desires and interest in men that have nothing to do with a closeted gay identity. He may be fighting with concerns that he is gay and does not want to be. He might believe the popular press that if he is sexual with men he is gay when he knows he is not.

Perhaps if there was room for men to explore their homosexual interests and desires without having to label it, there would be little to no public restroom sex and few to no people fighting with themselves about sex sex behavior and a gay sexual identity

There needs to be room for other opinions than simply he is gay!