You’re thinking it even if you don’t say it: Are gay people perverts?

Once you think the forbidden thought, of course, the pc shield goes up in your consciousness: of course not! I know gay people! There’s nothing wrong with it! How dare you!

Then the id again creeps up and whispers in your ear: of course there’s nothing wrong with it, of course we all know and love gay people…but…well….why are they still getting AIDS, the most preventable disease since alcoholism? Why were 90 percent of the priest abuse cases involving priests with teen-age boys? (Why did the Jesuit who taught me ethics class at Georgetown Prep leave the school and the order to live with one of my classmates?) Why did one gay man, in the documentary “Gay Sex in the 70s,” rue the gay scene’s obsession with sex, it’s reduction of everyone to body parts? Indeed, that film is a distressing revelation: gay men gathered like cattle in the old abandoned New York docks, have sex with anyone and everyone who’s there. Why the insatiable obsession with sex?

Why was Senator Foley so incontinent sexually and so, well, repetitive, compulsive and creepy?

I don’t know the answer to that question. A thoughtful analysis could speculate that because gay people were suppressed for so long in America, they developed clandestine and unhealthy ways of expressing their sexuality, and now that there is more acceptance the compulsive way their expressed themselves will evaporate. Andrew Sullivan has argued as much and it would be nice to think he’s right.

The other explanation, the explanation that dare not speak its name, is that along with the genetic or hormonal hardwiring that makes someone gay comes a level of pathological compulsiveness. It’s there waiting to explode the way alcoholism is, and requires a constant struggle to tamp down.

Of course, in our free, open and tolerant media, don’t expect anyone to touch the third rail that Foley has exposed. Well, maybe one of the media’s go-to gay guys, John Cloud, will. Last year Cloud published an endless cover story in Time magazine about America’s “Gay Teens.” It is the usual stew of pc agenda-advancing and conservative-bashing in the guise of straight (so to speak) journalism. I know this because Cloud is a gay man - a very liberal and dangerously promiscuous one, if a graphic article he once published in a popular newspaper is any indication. Indeed, Cloud’s older piece subverts a main point of his Time dissertation - ie that the notion of gay men as promiscuous and reckless is a dangerous stereotype.

Again - and here is where I may get in trouble with my fellow religious conservatives - I don’t care that in 1997 Cloud - who at the time had a boyfriend - visited a house in Washington, D.C., and paid $8 to watch men having group sex and watch gay porno. I mean, sure, as a Catholic I think it’s bad for his soul. But I don’t lose sleep over it. As I said, maybe the repressive milieu in America made him do it. What concerns me is that Cloud is a liberal with an agenda to make homosexuality mainstream - and that that bias is not addressed or admitted in his massive article. If Time asked me to do a profile of the pope, as early in the piece as possible I would announce that I am an orthodox Catholic - then I would proceed to give the other side a fair shake. Cloud doesn’t admit the bias, and his disdain for those who disagree is not well hidden. And his piece says not thing one about promiscuity and the gay community.

Cloud should address this issue, as brave gay journalists like Randy Shilts and Andrew Sullivan have. But then, Cloud - like all of us sinners - may have the very problem he’s reluctant to explore. In 1997 he wrote a disturbing piece which appeared in the Washington City Paper, a tiresome hipster weekly published in DC. In “The Naked City,” Cloud - who had a boyfriend at the time - ventures to a house in the Adams Morgan section of the city and, after paying $8, is admitted into the house. Cloud’s intention was clear: “I had always assumed (and, admittedly, hoped), that while one of the activities might well be massage, other activities were even more…well, hands on. I got a couple of friends to admit that they had attended, and one of them described the parties this way: ‘It’s sort of like a bathhouse without the baths.”

Indeed. There’s no need to go into the details of what Cloud saw, which is sickening. Some of it was hard even for Cloud himself to take - well, kind of. “Feeling equal measures of pity, disgust, and horniness,” he writes after seeing something out of latter-day Rome, “I skulk back into the hallway and then into the ‘smoking room.’” Cloud gets “groped here and there” before escaping Hell House, but not before making this observation: “Though I’m not sure, I imagine most of the guests to be closeted, and a fair number married. With their conservative styling [!], I can also imagine most of them in K street law firms or federal office buildings or Northern Virginia computer companies. Strangely, I can’t imagine them at a sex party, even as I watch them have orgasms.”

Around the same time, Cloud also wrote a guide to DC gay bathhouses for the City Paper. No need for details, you get the idea.

Cut to almost 20 years later. Cloud, now ensconced at Time, offers a gigantic cover story on gay teens. According to Cloud, “kids are disclosing their homosexuality with unprecedented regularity - and they are doing it much younger.” Fact or advocacy? Fact, writes Cloud, and conservatives are getting on board. “When their kids come out,” Cloud writes, “many conservatives - just ask the Vice President - start to seem uncomfortable with traditionalist, rigid views on gays.” The kids these days are entering a brave new world: “Until recently, growing up gay meant awaiting a lifetime of secrecy - furtive encounters, darkened bar windows, crushing deracination.” These days gay teens “no longer need endure the baleful combination of loneliness and longing that characterized the childhood of so many gay adults.” Books, networks, movies and big business all cater to gays. These days, “at many schools it is now profoundly uncool to be seen as anti-gay.” Furthermore, “it’s important to note that nearly all mental-health professionals agree that trying to reject one’s homosexual impulses will usually be fruitless and depressing.” Fine, fine, fine - uncle! But is promiscuity a problem here?

No time for that, because even the Christians are getting involved in dealing with gays - although, of course, this is not good news to Cloud. “In a jarring bit of rhetorical mimicry,” Cloud writes, “many Christians who work with gay kids have adopted the same pc tributes to ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ employed [by gay activist groups].” They’ve even had the gall to publish a book - it boasts, in Cloud’s phrase, “the near parodic title Loving Homosexuals as Jesus would.” I don’t suppose it would do much good at this point to speculate that to most Americans there is nothing at all parodic about that title. Or to once again note that the decent thrust behind much political correctness, the desire to respect the personhood of others, actually came from Christianity itself. Of course, the left has taken that very Christian, very Western idea and turn it into a totalitarian system of groupthink and racism. But I digress. The point is that gay sex and Democratic groupthink is good, and conservatism and Christianity bad. But Cloud puts it much better when talking about Exodus, a group dedicated to helping gays become chaste Christians: “A lot of Exodus youths seem captives of their Christianity, caught in a hermetic loop of lust and gay sex (or masturbation), followed by confession and grim determination.” And gay activist Michael Glatze is worried that gay kids, unlike their parents generation, won’t be obsessed with sex: “I don’t think the gay movement understands the extent to which the next generation just wants to be normal kids. The people who are getting that are the Christian right.”

Normal kids! Well, that is cause for concern. According to some of the kids co-opted by the Christian right, the gay lifestyle has a certain “superficiality” about it, and an obsession with dangerous anonymous sex with multiple partners. In the summation of his piece, Cloud tries to debunk the “stereotype” of gay men being pathological sexual predators who - well, who visit anonymous sex houses. Perhaps he should read his own clip file.

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