Senator Craig redux

So you're born.

You're a kid. You're attracted to toys. You like crayons and dolls, but you're given trucks and soldiers. And downcast glances from the surrounding adults when you protest. You are told what is appropriate and what is not.

So you do what is appropriate because you want to be a good boy. You want the validation good boys get.

With every passing season, you have urges to do more and more inappropriate things. Sure, girls are pretty. But as you twirl around with them at the Freshman Snowball, it is the angular boys who make your eyes smoky.

You look away, you force yourself, telling yourself it is wrong and unnatural. You just have to try harder, be more conservative. Behave yourself and it will go away. It is silly and stupid. You will grow out of it.

(something deep inside of you says this is horribly wrong. But you have no choice, so you ignore this instinct)

You go to the conservative church with your parents. You embrace all things conservative. If you practice, practice, practice, the thing inside you will go away. You pray to God. If you are an enthusiastic member of His team, He will surely erase the wrong thing.

(shhhh. don't worry. no one will ever find out what you do with those other boys in secret places that feels so good)

Conservatives all around you all the time. Your family, telling you what is right and what to be. You find the more you act like them, the more approval they give you. Approval feels good. You go to a conservative college and keep talking loud and conservatively.

(you are very quiet during the stolen moments with the beautiful boys)

You marry a conservative woman, one who will match your burgeoning political career. You mount and impregnate her. These are simple motions. The children come.

The older you get, the more you realize that the urges inside of you are not going to go away. They are elemental. And The Other people would accept them. But they wear blue and ride donkeys. You wear red and are high on a lumbering elephant, which means money and power and adoration from all the conservatives. You speak their language and wish, wish, wish with all your heart that you could believe it. So you speak it louder in order to imbue the words with power. You denounce and denounce. Sometimes you even think it is working.

(all of this is very big, so you must keep the lovers very anonymous and secret. you may not even exchange names)

Years pass. You instill your children with the conservative values you want so desperately to believe because nothing could be worse than the hell you have lived. And every week you pray at church, searching for an answer, praying it could be different, hoping this thing is not genetic and that it is in one of your children.

(your desire does not wane. you want and want and want, something sexual and brilliant and dynamic, but this you may not have for such a thing would surely be discovered. life is not fair.)

The covert tricks and behaviors are easy enough to learn. Sometimes money changes hands, sometimes not. The acts are played out in filthy places. They are not the honest sex acts you crave

(the most dishonest sex acts are those with your wife you are sorry you are sorry sorry sorry sorr)

the simple human connection with another man,

(it hurts no one but you can't have it)

but they are all you may have, so you settle for the sordid couplings and all their banal satisfaction.

(sorry can't have it and help. who would ever know it's just the taptaptap of my foot just like Dorothy trying to get the hell out of Oz and I've got something that will put you over the rainbow big guy)

And in one instant inside a vile public bathroom stall, your entire life crumbles.