Frank Rich Discovers the Sex Panic

''I DID nothing wrong,'' said Larry Craig at the start of his long national nightmare as America's favorite running, or perhaps sitting, gag. That's the truth. Justice lovers of all sexual persuasions must rally to save the Idaho senator before he is forced to prematurely evacuate his seat.

That was the opening graph in Frank Rich's September 23 column in the Sunday Times. The columnist, surely a bright spot for many New Yorkers come Sunday mornings, continued:

Not only did the senator do nothing wrong, but in scandal he has proved the national treasure that he never was in his salad days as a pork-seeking party hack. In the past month he has served as an invaluable human Geiger counter for hypocrisy on the left and right alike. He has been an unexpected boon not just to the nation's double-entendre comedy industry but to the imploding Republican Party....

What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and ''wide stance'' were at most a form of flirtation. As George Will has rightly argued, if deviancy can be defined down to ''signaling an interest in sex,'' then deviancy is what ''goes on in 10,000 bars every Saturday night in our country.'' It's free speech even if the toes and fingers do the talking.

The Minnesota sting operation may well be unconstitutional, as the A.C.L.U. says. Yet gay civil rights organizations, eager to see a family-values phony like Mr. Craig brought down, have been often muted or silent on this point. They stood idly by while Republicans gathered their lynching party, thereby short-circuiting public debate about the legitimacy of the brand of police entrapment that took place in Minnesota. Surely that airport could have hired a uniformed guard to police a public restroom rather than train a cop to enact a punitive ''Cage aux Folles'' pantomime.

Rich's observations were an important corrective to so much of the coverage of the Craig matter. At Gay City News, we can say that because nearly three weeks before, we made some of these same points.

First Duncan Osborne, in "Troubling Questions In Craig's Fall:"

For David K. Johnson, the flood of publicity that followed a report on the arrest of US Senator Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, resembled the era he wrote about in "The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government," a 2004 book.

"I guess it called to mind a long history of Washington sex scandals, particularly gay sex scandals," said the history professor at the University of South Florida.

Martin Duberman, an emeritus professor of history at CUNY and the author of several books including "Stonewall," a 1994 history of the 1969 riots seen as marking the start of the modern gay rights movement, had a similar view.

"I guess one was what the hell are the cops still doing in bathrooms?" Duberman said when asked for any reactions to the stories. "That sent me back 50 years."

Andrew Miller, in a strongly argued op ed, "Larry Craig's Raw Deal," added his voice:

...Despite the schadenfreude we're probably all feeling, our movement does not have the luxury of picking and choosing whom it wants among its ranks. That Craig is not gay but just likes to hoover some dick whenever he's on layover is not a distinction that America is making at a gut level, despite protestations to the contrary. Whatever Craig believes about himself, he is being treated as a gay man.

The men whom Craig had sex with in tearooms are the same ones whose oppression he has enforced. Ironically, he is driven into tearooms by the society he helps to create and perpetuate. It is Larry Craig's right to sexual freedom we're fighting for, too.

In my own Letter from the Editor, "Sex Panic," I explored the deeply disturbing signs of anxiety I noted in the popular reaction to the scandal:

The issue began to emerge clearer for me when we posted my editor's letter last week online. Touching broadly on the Larry Craig matter, the letter specifically mocked an absurd question a CNN reporter posed to an undercover Atlanta airport cop about whether pedophilia was involved in any arrests he made... Before long, vituperative postings poured in. None was more disturbing than the following: "I know a toddler who was surrounded by gay perverts in a public bathroom who licked their lips and said they wanted to help him with his pants. But I guess that's alright too, because they're gay, right?" The contention is clearly apocryphal. In fact, I would argue, it's delusional. But it is also of a piece - even if in very extreme form - of much of what emerged in the public discourse in the past week...

A phenomenon documented repeatedly through history, a Sex Panic is a popular and hysterical reaction to perceived transgressions against public morality out of proportion to any underlying reality. Bound by rigid codes of sexual propriety, people simultaneously demonize those whose behavior they fear and exaggerate or perhaps completely misperceive the reality of that behavior... Anyone following the Craig story online has undoubtedly run across the sort of hysteria I found posted to my editor's letter last week. But, let's face it - most of the reaction was over the top... The real issue forming the indictment against Larry Craig's public service - his consistently anti-gay voting record, especially in the hypocritical light of his private conduct - goes largely unexamined by the media. Those who sought to spotlight the issue pre-Minneapolis are widely dismissed, even condemned, as gay activists with an outing agenda. A society traditionally hostile to the sexual rights of gay men thus suddenly adopts the conceit that privacy above all is sacrosanct.