scripted
Music: Today on NBC
When I was a senior in high school, during my last semester, a rumor was circulated that I was spotted at a downtown club kissing another boy in a parking lot.
It was true that I was a "club kid"---every weekend my friends and I used to drink, drop, and go to a club called Boys and Girls, which then moved and renamed itself Plastic. I don't doubt that I was spotted out and about town on the weekends (with gaudy mod or goth drab and hair that stuck straight-up, I was hard to miss). But I do not recall making out with another guy in high school—which is my loss, of course, but back in the 80s sexual experimentation twernt quite as permissible as it is today.
Regardless, what really upset me was that the high school wrestling coach, who also taught advanced algebra, was relating this rumor to his classes. Is it true, he would ask each period of mostly seniors, that "your class president is gay?" I got word of this, and one day during the last period (like around 1:30 p.m I think) I walked out of English and into his classroom. He looked up in mid overhead-projecting action, and I remember saying, defiantly, that I was not gay and the rumor circulating was not true and that I didn't appreciate his talking about it in class. I was angry, but I suspect I came off as fairly polite.
Surprisingly, there was little fall-out. The stories that I fantasized would circulate about my outburst didn't circulate. One would expect some disciplinary action---that Coach would've turned me in. He didn't, which means the reports of his rumor spreading were probably true.
I learned later, the year after I graduated, he was fired for having sexual relations with a high school student.
Memory of this rumor came to mind when I heard on the radio Idaho Senator Larry Craig passionately deny that he was gay after being arrested---and pleading guilty---for cruising in an Atlanta Minneapolis airport bathroom. Apparently rumors of his liaisons had been circulating for years. His defiant speech reminded me of my own, the speech of a smug 18 year old moving out of state for college (virtually unheard of in Snellville, Georgia at that time, the Spring of 1992).
If I could re-live my high school moment, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have said anything, but simply let people wonder (you'll get hit on twice as much). Senator Larry Craig, however, doesn't have this option because of the self-destructive, teenager script he has elected to follow: rather than acknowledge his homoerotic feelings, he acts out in binarism (secret liaisons, then public persecutions of gay people and denials). There are only two routes to go by today: complete denial, or rehab. What makes either script so ridiculous is that they are so cinematic and evangelical: hasn't everyone seen American Beauty at this point? Hasn't Reverend Ted Haggard taught us what being the poster boy for the "repressive hypothesis" entails? Craig provides yet another example of the real-world labor of fantasy. The fantasy of denial, as the film teaches us, is one step-away from violent rupture.