My Standards on "Outing"

The Gay Species has taken me to task for having double standards and not endorsing the outing of two gay students at Hollis F. Price Middle College High in Memphis, Tennessee, by the school principal. His charge is based on my support of the efforts of Mike Rogers at Blog Active in exposing closeted Republicans with anti-gay voting records and closeted clergy who preach against gays and engender anti-gay hate and discrimination.. For the record, I want to make it clear why I believe there ARE two (2) different standards depending upon the circumstances/actions of the person(s) being outed and why this view is not "hypocritical:"

The first standard - which might be called the private individual standard - applies to closeted gays who mind their own business and take no public stands and take no actions that support or further an anti-gay agenda. Individuals in this category have every right to keep their personal life private. At this point in my life, I now favor as many people as possible being "out" and living their lives openly. However, since it took me 37 years in the closet and 5 years of therapy to recover from my childhood religious indoctrination to get to this point, I cannot demand that individuals who are doing no harm to the LGBT community be outed against their will. This is the standard that I believe applies to the two high school boys at Hollis F. Price Middle College High.

The second standard applies to closeted individuals consisting of (1) elected officials and their staffers who actively support and work for the passage of anti-gay legislation that harms or reduces the legal rights of other LGBT indviduals and/or (2) clergy who preach anti-gay rhetoric and engender animosity aginst LGBT individuals. In my view, these individuals - who are meddling in and interferring with the personal lives of other gays - have forfeited the right claim that their personal lives are off limits. If they want to intrude into my life and impair my legal rights, then they need to be exposed for the hypocrite phonies that they are. By their own anti-gay jihad they have given up the right to keep their own gay sexual conduct private.

A case in point is former Congressman Ed Schrock of Virginia's 2nd District who had one of the most anti-gay voting records in Congress yet who was soliciting gay sex via Mega Phone in the greater Norfolk area. I knew Ed Schrock personally and even warned him - and later the entire Virginia Beach delegation to the Virginia General Assembly - that the GOP war on gays would result in someone outing Schrock. The warning fell on deaf ears and someone whose identity I have never learned subsequently furnished the audiotapes to Mike Rogers that ended Schrock's career.

In Schrock's case, I feel sorry for his family, particularly his wife who is a gracious woman, but as to Ed personally, he brought the disaster on himself due to his hypocrisy. He knew the risks, actively sought out gay trysts, and did not care, all the while voting for legislation that harmed members of the LGBT community or which denigrated their legal rights as citizens. Former pastor Ted Haggart is another example of someone who preached an anti-gay message, yet sought out gay sex on the sly. The situation of these two men is nothing analogous to the boys outed by their school principal