THE FINGER-POINTING in the Mark Foley scandal has curiously not focused on one particularly powerful player complicit in allowing the Florida Republican to continue his detrimental behavior for years: the American media.
By not reporting on Foley's deceitful life for more than 15 years -- during which he portrayed himself as a heterosexual politician -- the media enabled a man overwhelmed by the destructiveness of the closet to ultimately implode in the halls of Congress. By looking the other way on something that made them uncomfortable -- reporting on closeted gay public figures, particularly those who are hypocrites -- and by deluding themselves that it's a privacy issue, reporters, producers and editors took part in perpetuating a fiction, one that may well have led to an ugly outcome.
Well-intentioned people, including gay activists and gay journalists like myself, rightly want to separate Foley's homosexuality from his predatory behavior. Yet in the zeal to make this point, a fundamental issue has been overlooked. Although homosexuality, like heterosexuality, is not inherently dangerous, repressed sexuality -- whether it's repressed homosexuality or repressed heterosexuality -- certainly can be harmful when the dam bursts.
Foley lived in a glass closet in Washington, where many people, we're now being told, assumed he was gay, even as he orchestrated a lie for the voters of his district with help from the media both in Washington and at home in Florida.
Foley's closet wasn't just about protecting his political career. He seemed to be filled with shame. According to one gay man quoted in the Washington Post last week who challenged Foley on his voting for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, Foley justified marginalizing gay marriage by saying, "I could never compare any relationship I have ever had to the nature of my mother and father's relationship."
For Foley, homosexuality meant second-class status.
That kind of self-loathing is bound to play out in harmful ways. Would Foley have made online sexual advances on teenagers if he were openly gay or if he'd been reported on, truthfully, by the media as a gay man long ago, and faced the consequences? It's quite possible the answer is no.
