A Crucible Moment Getting expelled from high school for wearing a rainbow flag sounds harsh enough, but what if the rainbow isn’t even a rainbow? Consider the case of 
fifteen-year old Kayla Kenney, who celebrated her birthday with her family, after which her mother posted a photo on Facebook. Kayla is shown wearing a sweater with some colored stripes that Head of School Dr. Bruce Jacobson caught sight of, and before long Kayla had been expelled from Whitefield Academy, a Christian school in Smyrna, Georgia, for displaying a symbol of homosexuality. Kayla has denied that the design was a symbol of any kind, and a not very careful inspection reveals that it isn’t even close to a rainbow flag (um, four stripes?). The fact that school administrators thought they saw such a flag reminds one of the collective hallucination that caused people in 1690s Salem to imagine natural objects turning into symbols of witchcraft, or people seeing Jesus’ face on their toast. The habit of turning things into metaphors was a particular idée fixe of Susan Sontag, who’s on the cover of this issue and who understood well the hypnotic powers of metaphor that could cause a principal to look at a birthday shirt and see a symbol of “evil.”
It Pains Us to Report LGBTQNation has compiled a list of “gotcha” moments for anti-gay hypocrites titled “Schadenfreude: The Top Five Times Anti-lgbtq Conservatives Were Busted for, Well, You Know.” And the winners are: #1. Joseph McLoone, a Catholic priest who embezzled $100,000 to pay for Grindr hookups with men (those Grindr boys can be expensive!). #2. Tennessee State Rep. Bill Sanderson (R), who pushed for anti-LGBT legislation every chance he got, i.e., when he wasn’t hitting on a long series of much younger men. #3. Mike Folmer, a Republican state rep who chairs a major committee, who blocked passage of LGBT rights legislation for years and was arrested for uploading child pornography. #4. Our old friend Aaron Schock, the former U.S. rep from Illinois who always voted against gay rights, is still officially straight, and was recently photographed stuffing a bill into a male stripper’s thong in West Hollywood. #5 is too weird to explain. And then there’s the word “Schadenfreude” in the heading: Surely we take no pleasure in reporting on these instances of hypocrisy and poetic justice!
How It’s Done An evangelical youth pastor with a popular TV broadcast that included frequent anti-gay rants, Paul Acton Bowen of Gadsden, Alabama, has been sentenced to 1,008 years in prison for sexually abusing six teenage boys (ages thirteen to sixteen) under his care. As similar cases pile up, the most striking thing about this one may be its unremarkableness. Just as the Catholic priests followed a fairly standard playbook in the seduction of altar boys, Bowen went about it logically and methodically. The fact that he was a youth pastor should surprise no one, and his status as a televangelist allowed him to travel out of state and abroad. He used his largesse to give the boys gifts and take them on trips, where they were suitably wined and dined. (Things haven’t changed much since ancient Athens.) Ah, but nothing in this life is free, as the boys soon learned. Equally routine was Bowen’s defense, which was to claim that he had been abused as a teenager—which is the Hail Mary defense these days when there’s no question of guilt, backed by a bit of science showing that many sexual abusers were themselves abused. The defense attorney put forth a rather baroque account of how Bowen was re-enacting the details of his own trauma when seducing the lads, right down to taking them to Mexican restaurants beforehand, the idea being that he was acting under some irrestible force, zombie-like, rather than carefully contriving to create the exact situation that would make these sexual liaisons possible, starting from the moment he signed on as a youth pastor twelve years before his arrest.
See of Debt Is it possible that the Roman Catholic Church could literally go bust due to its little problem with parish priests? Probably not, but if some day you read that the Vatican is selling off Michelangelos, you’ll know why. A new study by the AP estimates that the current bill for damages related to the sexual abuse of minors could be over four billion dollars and counting. In the U.S. alone, there could be over 5,000 new cases just in New York, New Jersey, and California, which are among the 23 states that have no statute of limitations for sex abuse claims. Paul Mones, an L.A. lawyer who’s won millions in such cases, thinks much will depend on whether these lawsuits can be settled out of court: “If anyone starts trying these cases, the numbers could become astronomical.” Could it be that the Church that fended off the invasion of Islam in the first millennium and the revolt of Protestantism in the second will be done in by the randiness of parish priests in the third?
“Got a Pistol?” An exhibition recently closed in Paris (but coming to New York!) titled Les Tasses: Public Toilets, Private Affairs, all about an institution that arose in the 1830s and lasted into the 1980s: those open-air urinals that gave men a little more privacy than peeing on trees and walls. Indeed it is the ambiguously private nature of the pissotières that makes them interesting. The exhibit pulls no punches about the obvious utility of these facilities for gay men on the prowl. Despite various crackdowns and graffiti campaigns, this hookup scene had a pretty good run. Another slice of urinal history that’s spotlighted is the Nazi occupation of World War II, when the French Résistance, along with Allied soldiers and spies, used the stalls to pass messages and weapons—which also seems obvious, though apparently the Nazis never caught on. Given these two activities, one must assume there were occasions when signals got crossed in coded queries involving guns and pipes.
