Where’s the Outrage?

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A“writer, teacher, and gay porn star” named Conor Habib recently published an article in Salon.com called “Rest Stop Confidential.” He describes how, when he was fifteen, a grown man exposed himself to him in a highway rest stop. The image churned in the young man’s mind until he was old enough to buy his own car. And among the first trips he took was to a highway rest stop, where he found homosexual nirvana, anonymous sex, and plenty of it.

Habib writes, “If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times; we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. It never stops, not for season or time. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new.”

It’s not just rest stops either. Habib says men will go almost anywhere at any time to have anonymous sex: “Often, there was a fence that blocked off the woods, and a break in that fence cut by someone who had been there before. There was a path of mud through the grass, worn down by use.  In the woods, we’d find a clearing, and there, many things would happen.”

Habib wants you to know this is part and parcel of the homosexual experience. The online comments after his article attest to this. There were some criticisms, but mostly from those who were obviously heterosexual. Others expressed disbelief that such a scene exists. Still others chime in to second Habib that this kind of thing is widespread.

One man really objected, however, and actually did something about it. Mott Huddleston – a lawyer from Kansas City – citing Habib’s column as the last straw, launched a petition drive calling for homosexuals to abstain from sex before marriage or civil union and for fidelity within marriage. In a few short weeks, the petition has already gathered more than 5,000 names.

None of this is exceptional except when you know that Huddleston is himself a homosexual who says he is waiting for marriage to have sex and his petition is only for those homosexuals who agree. His petition states, “We, as gay men and women, call upon our fellow gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals, and transgenders to consider that human sexuality is ordered to one partner and this in a life-long commitment of marriage or union.”

The petition has been so successful that Huddleston and his fellow petitioners have announced the formation of an organization they are calling Trad-Gay that they intend will be active in all fifty states. They say there is a great number of homosexuals who profoundly oppose the sexual profligacy of what they say is the dominant homosexual culture.

Huddleston claims to be a typical homosexual. He’s felt gay all his life. He believes sexual orientation is innate. He is not particularly religious though he was raised Methodist. He jokes, however, that he may become the Jerry Falwell of homosexuals.


        Mr. Mott Huddleston, activist

Now here is the question. Between these two fairly outrageous stories, between Conor Habib and his sexual mania and Mott Huddleston and his church-lady disapproval, which one is real and which one is fiction? I am tempted to suggest that to ask the question is to answer it.

On the one hand, there is Habib. His story seems sadly unremarkable. We all know about anonymous homosexual trysts in city parks and bathrooms. Remember Larry Craig and the airport bathroom? Remember singer George Michael getting arrested in a Beverly Hills bathroom? Did any of this go out of style with the advent of the AIDS threat? It sure seems not.

We know there are, in fact, websites devoted to telling homosexuals where they can have anonymous sex in any city they may visit. And social science tells us the average homosexual has huge numbers of sex partners, dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of them. Studies show that even those who are in “committed” relationships still have dozens of other sex partners outside their primary relationship.

On the other hand there is Mott Huddleston. In the current marriage debate you hear homosexuals insist they want and need marriage in order to bless their “long-standing” relationships and to engender the blessings of marital stability in their community.

If they really mean this, wouldn’t at least some of them see Habib’s sexual idiom as troublesome and worthy of public condemnation? Wouldn’t there be Mott Huddlestons? Wouldn’t there be homosexual scolds who not only recoil at such activity as Habib’s, but who are willing to go on the hustings about it?

OK, Mott Huddleston is fiction. He does not exist. But then you probably figured that out. I made him up to underscore what we already know, that someone like Mott Huddleston not only does not exist he likely cannot exist in the homosexual community. Someone in the homosexual community who disapproves of sexual buccaneering? Not a chance.

And Habib? You just know he’s real and we fear he may be the norm. The question therefore becomes, do all homosexuals support this type of sexual sickness? Is this kind of moral insanity so mainstream that it infects the moral judgment of even those “conservative” Log Cabin Republicans? Where are they on this? Silent, that’s where.

And what about those in the mainstream of the homosexual rights movement, the Human Rights Campaign? Wouldn’t they think anonymous sex with hundreds of partners is not such a good idea?

Where is the outrage about Conor Habib? Where the heck is Mott Huddleston when we really need him?


 

 

Austin Ruse is the President of the New York and Washington, D.C.-based Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam), a research institute that focuses exclusively on international social policy. The opinions expressed here are Mr. Ruse’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of C-Fam.