Texas v. Rosenthal It’s hard to believe it was only four years ago that the Supreme Court banned anti-sodomy laws in the U.S. once and for all. The year was 2004—the last big election year; the case was Lawrence v. Texas; and the Defense was represented by the outspokenly homophobic Houston District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal. It would be depressing to recite his arguments for keeping consensual gay sex illegal in Texas, so let’s move right to the comeuppance phase. It all started in the customary drip-drip fashion when a slew of e-mails surfaced that showed the DA coming on to his secretary and former mistress, telling racist jokes (right down to watermelon punch lines), and, of course, downloading a healthy measure of porn. But, ah, the booby-traps of modern life: what’s putting the DA in the deepest doo-doo is not so much the salacious e-mails they found as the thousands he deleted, taking great pains to destroy them permanently. Except, it turns out—who knew?—the act of deleting e-mails is recorded even if the records themselves are lost. And this constitutes destruction of evidence, which is a big no-no for an officer of the law. Rosenthal resigned as DA last February, but because he lied about having deleted the e-mails, he now faces perjury charges. So he may again be the defendant in a Texas case, only this time with the state as the prosecutor.
Exclusive Excusado How jokes and such translate cross-culturally is one of those eternal mysteries, so make what you will of a recent incident in Argentina. It was actually more of a discovery on the part of a gay couple who decided to spend the day at a beach on the Paraná Island resort and went to use the men’s room. There, marking off one section of the 
facility, was a sign that read “Homosexuals Gays Faggots.” At first the duo thought it could be a friendly gesture, but hmm… So they took a photo and showed it around and soon people were up-in-arms and the local press even pursued the story. Asked to comment on the sign, resort owner Juan Cabrera claimed it was intended as a joke, albeit an in-joke for his employees. Here’s where the cross-cultural problem comes into play. For an American such a sign conjures memories of Jim Crow laws and segregated restrooms, something you don’t joke about. On the other hand, public restrooms can be used for a variety of activities, so maybe this sign was supposed to be a welcoming gesture of sorts. If so, for at least some employees this resort sounds like it could be a fun place to work!
Other Countries’ Crazies It’s reassuring to know that the U.S. isn’t the only country with religious leaders who say that natural disasters are caused (among other things) by gay rights laws. It was actually an Israeli member of parliament, Shlomo Benizri of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, who claimed that recent tremors felt in Israel were caused by legislation that gave “legitimacy to sodomy.” The law in question was the decriminalization of homosexuality back in 1988. Apparently, God works in languid ways; what’s more, many other things have surely happened during this twenty-year period that could have incurred his wrath. But perhaps gay Israelis should take heart in the fact that these tremors were mild ones: it seems we’ve made a bit of progress since God smote the city of Sodom in one fell swoop.
A Tale of Two Dildos Progress can be reported on two fronts in the battle to put sex toys into the hands of any adult who wants to own them. The stories unite two places, Texas and Sweden, that would seem to occupy opposite poles on some imaginary spectrum of civic enlightenment. For while the one was struggling to decide whether sex toys should be banned from public sale, the other was stocking the shelves of state-owned drugstores with dildos and other sex aids.
• Not to prolong the suspense, it was Texas that awoke one morning to the headline, “Breaking News: Dildo Ban in TX Ruled Unconstitutional,” announcing that the U.S. Fifth Circuit had, by a 2–1 vote, struck down Texas’ ban on “sexual devices” as a violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The majority opinion also cited good old Lawrence v. Texas: “Because of Lawrence, the issue before us is whether the Texas statute impermissibly burdens the individual’s substantive due process right to engage in private intimate conduct of his or her choosing.”
• While Texas was deciding, in effect, that sex toys could now be sold in seedy porn shops or delivered in plain brown packages, Sweden was voting to allow its government-run Apoteket pharmacy chain to begin supplying dildos and the like as a health benefit for its citizens.
Touched Therapy It was bound to happen: a “therapist” in the “ex-gay” movement has been convicted of sexual assault for practices directly related to the “treatment” he administered to a gay man undergoing “conversion therapy.” (Okay, we’ll stop with the quotation marks.) There’s a widespread practice among ex-gay practitioners known as “touch therapy” (sorry), which involves lots of physical contact between therapist and patient. It sounds crazy—wouldn’t this be like giving whisky to people at an AA meeting?—but it goes to the ex-gays’ theory of homosexuality, according to which boys become gay because they’re denied “father love” when growing up, which is why they crave physical contact with men later on. So the idea behind all the hugging and cuddling is that this will fill the void left by the father and—somehow—reduce the desire for sex with other males. It’s worth noting here that most of the therapists in ex-gay centers are themselves ex-gay alumnæ. And with that as the setup, it comes as no huge surprise that several ex-gay therapists have been convicted of sexual assault. The most recent (reported by The Winnipeg Sun, 2/16/08) was a Canadian named Terrance Lewis, whose improvised therapy went one step further—or two, or three—than the prescribed dose of contact. For Lewis, touch therapy did not exclude kissing, fondling, and sexual role playing, nor even having an initiate masturbate in the back seat of his car. Which is just the sort of thing that those deprived of father love missed when growing up. No wonder they turned out gay!
