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Sex and politics is like watching a train wreck. You know it’s going to be horrific but you just can’t help yourself.
Add two gay men, one perhaps underage, and you’ve got a train carrying nuclear waste derailing and heading for a superhighway at rush hour.
Just ask Sam Adams, Portland, Oregon’s openly gay mayor. His election was heralded by progressives everywhere after winning a 12-way primary last May with 58 percent of the vote. There was no run off because he captured more than 50 percent of the ballots cast. Yet during the campaign, he successfully dodged rumors that he had had a relationship with a much younger man.
The scuttlebutt was that when Adams was 40 years old and a city commissioner he had a relationship with Beau Breedlove, then an 18-year old intern. Both of them denied it.
But in the last few weeks, new evidence has surfaced and Adams was forced to admit to the relationship. It has also come out that Adams asked Breedlove to lie about it. Well, the proverbial cat is out of the bag and Adams is facing calls for his resignation and a criminal investigation.
It’s sordid for sure. But it’s also incredibly disappointing.
Once again, a male politician has let the wrong head do his thinking for him.
I’ve been watching the gay listservs on this and the response has been interesting but not that surprising. Most of the men who respond are saying as long as it was consensual and Breedlove was 18, there was nothing wrong with them having a relationship. On the other hand, the women are quick to point out that there’s an inherent power imbalance, that it is inappropriate to have a relationship with someone 22 years your junior especially when the junior is still a teenager. It’s one thing for a 40 year old and a 62 year old. It’s another, at least in my book, for a 40 year old and an 18 year old—regardless of gender or sexual orientation—to have a sexual relationship.
Beyond the age difference eewww factor here, there’s also the question of just plain common sense. If you’re a gay or lesbian politician, despite all the advances we’ve made, you still have to live up to a higher standard. Any mention of sex and a gay pol immediately opens the homophobes’ doors to chants of “See we told you so. You can’t trust those gays. It’s all about sex with them. They’re predators. They go after children.”
Plain and simple, we face a double standard. Despite all the hoopla around Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky or even John Edwards’ two-timing Elizabeth in the face of her fight with cancer, there’s still a wink and a nod that happens when straight male elected officials get it on with younger, female subordinates. That, “yeah, you still go it” stud thinking just takes over. After all, politics is about power and there’s nothing more powerful than using your power to have sex with whomever you want.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a few straight male pols who got caught and paid for it. Look at Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Clean was caught getting dirty and his political enemies—from both sides of the aisle—lined up to make sure his days were numbered.
It seems to me that Spitzer’s problem bears some resemblance to that of gay politicians. Of his own doing, Spitzer put himself out there as a reformer, a punisher of prostitution, a family man who loved his wife and kids, an elected official who was above reproach because he lived his rhetoric. He set the standard high for himself and he had to live up to it.
Gay elected officials also have a very high standard. I wish I could say that we set it for ourselves and that we recognize that we have to be more careful and more conscientious. But that’s not the case. Simply because we are gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender—simply because we live outside of society’s norm of heterosexual sex—the bar is set incredibly high for us and one misstep, one wrong move, one encounter can bring our credibility crashing down around our feet.
Sam Adams says he’s staying. What’s more important is whether or not he can effectively do his job now that he’s fallen from the pedestal he never asked to be put on but couldn’t avoid even if he wanted to.
Missed the last Proudly Out? Read it here.
