There’ve been a few recent threads on Haggard, outing, and the moral obligation of gays and lesbians in the face of his downfall. This comment, for example, in the pandagon thread:
No, [outing] is not ever OK.
It’s a useful touchstone to gauge the moral trustworthiness of people, though. Do they “out” when it suits them, or are their fine principles of privacy and individual choice applied to everyone?
(Other commenters on Pandagon dealt with this, of course.)
It’s the ol’ “tolerance of intolerance” chestnut, in other words. If you complain when someone attempts to criminalize your life, you’re not allowed to point out that he’s secretly just like you. But it’s also something else: a dismaying misunderstanding about identity politics and what community obligation should really look like. I get the strong sense that we’re supposed to read Haggard’s story differently from, say, Jimmy Swaggart’s because Haggard happens to be* gay. I’m bothered by it, because it rests in turn on the wrongheaded beliefs about queer and straight that create hatred in the first place.
This story is a cliche in queer movies and plays: the most vicious homophobe is outed as the biggest homo. Bent, It’s in the Water, East Palace West Palace, Lilies, American Beauty, and Urbania all contain scenes wherein the gay-hating villain is revealed as a secret lover of men. It appears in subtler form in countless other queer movies, from Priest to The Killing of Sister George to Boys Don’t Cry to Stonewall–frequently in sexualized interaction between queers and cops or other authority figures. The trope exists among other hated groups as well–take The Balcony, or Schindler’s List, or The God of Little Things. (It exists in a more general sense beyond that–the fairy tale dragon who is specially vulnerable because it has removed its own heart, who will die if it is ever destroyed.) We all know that we are not true outsiders, that we are hated because we live so close to home. We know that the moral cauterizers are desperate to get rid of us because they will never be rid of us.
The archetype of the vituperative butch closet case is not reducible to a belief in simple overcompensation–rather, it is an insistence that we acknowledge the truth of humanity: none of us are straight like Haggard’s public face was straight. This argument is already dealing with sexuality on the plane of metaphor, because it is made by a group of people who have been brutalized by paranoiac exegesis since before the Puritans trudged ashore. It deserves better than to be dismissed as wishful thinking on the part of a puny sexual minority, let alone as internalized homophobia. The fronting homo is not an actual homo, but a symbolic one, because the faggot core he’s obscuring is a symbol for irregular desire. It’s the universal crooked heart. To the extent that someone is homophobic, they don a sexual persona that is inhuman and therefore a lie about themselves and about everyone else. It doesn’t matter what actually gets them off. Queer or straight, they are closet cases. And–and this is important–homophobes. People who hate us and frequently wish us harm.
There’s another aspect to the erotic subtext of moral rectitude, one with which queer people are also familiar: getting off on being right and good where others are wrong and bad. A transgressive sexual category creates tourists as well as scapegoats: the spectators, the people who can be titillated without being compromised. The thrill in that situation comes as much from the knowledge that you are witnessing something degenerate while remaining pure, that you’re daring but not deviant, as from the novel spectacle itself. Why else would slumming be so much enhanced by humiliation? It’s not as simple as a dark thick line between the two groups, not when the underclass provides the upperclass with its reason for living. They’re demanding customers, and their superior position is not characterized merely by self-denial.
So Haggard’s place in all of this is not as simple as “closeted gay man.” He had an open sexual orientation, one whose performance he found deeply fulfilling, and which he shared with his entire congregation: obsessive supremacist hatred. It was homo-focused, too–he was getting off on gays. He did not merely compensate for homosexuality by pretending to heterosexuality. He compensated for humanity by becoming inhumane. His homophobia was part of his masculinity, yes, and required of him, but we cannot limit that connection to continence–this kind of heterosexual masculinity is about gratification, self-aggrandizement, power. Hatred and disgust, and the inspiration of hatred and disgust in others, was a vital component of his successful persona, and one which cannot be separated from the issue of the misery and deprivation he certainly felt. He gratified a great many impulses during his evangelical career. Hollow, base, and ultimately soul-destroying gratification, sure, but that doesn’t have anything to do with being gay.
I pity him, and I pity the person he was prior to this exposure. The treatment he is receiving at the hands of his congregation is just as reprehensible as it was when it targeted other fags. His earlier behavior does not excuse the reaction of his fellow believers. It’s not a satisfying outcome by any means, and it doesn’t leave me hopeful either for his potential happiness or his potential insight. This whole story is shameful. But I’m not going to pretend that his revelation makes him the victim, or that his current circumstances make him “one of us,” just because the human man he had to disown was made a little differently. His options and the decisions he made were more complex than that, and so must the response be.
*Last time I use that phrase in this post, I swear.