Hate Crime Crime The case of Jussie Smollett was a media feeding frenzy, but for you cave-dwellers: Smollett is the gay African-American actor who reported to the police that he’d been jumped by thugs in a racist, homophobic attack, only to be exposed for having staged the whole thing to gain public sympathy and a better deal with Fox for his work on the show Empire. It was a story tailor-made to be 
spun according to one’s political, racial, or sexual orientation. The leftish media wrung its hands over the vulnerability of a gay black man, even a famous one, to hate crimes—until the hoax was revealed, which was a bit awkward. At that point the right-wing media went into overdrive on the culture of victimization that led Smollett to think this was a good idea. Liberals chalked it up to the insecurities of one unstable actor. But here’s another way to think about this affair: For decades LGBT actors had to be totally closeted lest their careers be destroyed. We’ve now reached a place where a gay actor stages an attack and calls it a hate crime, fully expecting to gain credits from his fans both for his bravery in coming out as gay and for all that he’s had to endure. Had things gone as planned, he was probably not wrong in his calculation that the net effect of the gambit would be media coverage and a career boost. In a weird way, is this progress of a kind?
When in Rome Okay, quick: what’s the most anti-gay institution in world history? Did you think of the Catholic Church? Now: what’s the gayest institution in world history? If you answered the same way, you would probably not be wrong. In an explosive new book titled In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, French journalist Frédéric Martel contends that eighty percent of Vatican priests are gay. Based on 1,500 interviews, many with top Church officials, Martel’s research makes a persuasive case that the upper echelon of the Church hierarchy is homosexual to the core. The hypocrisy is cosmic in scope, and it plays itself out on the micro-cosmic level when individual priests try to cover their homo habits with exaggerated anti-gay posturing. Indeed Martel arrives at the same formulation that we’ve proposed based on long observation of anti-gay clergymen both Catholic and evangelical: The more stridently homophobic they are at the pulpit, the more likely they are to be gay.
O Lucky Man! We’ve followed Aaron Schock over the years, and now he’s back, possibly for the last time. For those who need a refresher, Schock is the former Republican Congressman from Ohio who voted against LGBT rights, posed shirtless for Men’s Health, worked out at a gay gym, and remodeled his D.C. office to resemble a Downton Abbey interior. The totally not gay congressman was later busted for financial shenanigans that forced him to resign from the House and face 24 counts of wire fraud, mail 
fraud, theft of government money, making false statements, and filing false documents. He was facing some serious jail time, but all at once the case against him has collapsed—and the titanic irony is that it’s all because of his sexual orientation! The reason he needed all that money, after all, was in order to pursue his fabulous lifestyle—the fancy cars, the glam vacations, the Downton Abbey office—which is what tipped off the Justice Department that Schock just might be gay. So they embarked on an in-depth investigation into his personal life to find out if the rumors were true. And that’s where the prosecutors went astray. The case is being thrown out because investigators acted inappropriately, and perhaps illegally, when they delved into Schock’s private sex life. So a deal has been struck that will allow Schock to pay a fine, stay out of jail, and continue crunching those abs.
The Other Lesbians It isn’t often that The G&LR is itself BTW-worthy, but the title of an International Spectrum in this issue, “The Men of Lesbos,” contains an unexpected confluence of terms. The Greek island is so closely identified with lesbians that we don’t often think about its male inhabitants, and it’s even more striking to learn that Lesbos is home to an all-male society that can only be described as a cult of the phallus. As luck would have it, Greek artist and photographer Dimitris Yeros has been wintering on Lesbos for many years, and the men’s cult and their elaborate rituals presented a stunning opportunity for a gay photographer. The phallic imagery is surprisingly explicit for a Greek Orthodox society, which raises the question of why the cult arose on this particular island. One possible clue appeared in this column a few years ago when the elders of Lesbos filed a series of lawsuits to stop various organizations from using the word “lesbian” when referring to gay women, claiming that they were the authentic Lesbians. Could it be that this Sappho thing has really gotten under their skin?
Ex-“Ex” Another BTW, another “ex-gay” leader exposed as gay—though admittedly “conversion therapy” maven David Matheson was classier than most in his self-defense. He was, to be sure, outed involuntarily by Truth Wins Out, but once the deed was done he admitted that he’d been gay all his life, albeit married to a woman and living an ostensibly heterosexual Mormon life. He apologized for any harm he’d caused his patients, acknowledged that conversion therapy is a fraud, and tried to calm his supporters over the shocking news about his sexuality. Seriously, why would anyone who wasn’t gay devote his entire life to this cause? Indeed Matheson had gone through the conversion program as a Mormon youth, so he knew firsthand that it didn’t work. And yet he went ahead with a practice whose only purpose could be to make these kids feel even lousier about themselves for being gay. Perhaps there’s a special place in “spooky Mormon hell” (for you BOM fans) for this guy.
