Another Republican Bites The…Prostitute

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. When sex is forbidden, sex is hidden. Forbidding it only pushes it below the surface, where it frequently becomes perverted as it inevitably is expressed anyway.

Take, for example, one Bruce Barclay. By all accounts a good man, a fine man, an excellent county commissioner and, yes, a Republican, which means he had to suppress any sexuality not approved of by his local fundamentalist Christians. So he never let on any hint that he was homosexual and allowed everyone to think he was a 48-year-old bachelor by choice (or, perhaps, because he was too busy fighting the good fight for his Pennsylvania county to actually date).

As it turns out, he wasn't too busy. He just couldn't date anyone he was attracted to publicly. And the question of marriage or even co-habiting was out. So he made use of the men of harrisburgfratboys.com, paying as much as $1500 for one of them.

Of course, that's a lot of money for "Five Short Minutes Of Love" as the late Jim Croce once put it. So, perhaps to enable his multiplying his enjoyment of these encounters at little additional cost, Barclay installed some video cameras in his home, attaching them to his home PC and recording every detail of the visits. A lot of cameras. Enough to cover his bathroom, bedrooms, and "indoor recreation areas" (I hate to imagine what went on in there.) They were hidden in radios, intercoms, and motion detectors. He also had at least one in his business, Bruce Barclay Electrical Contractor.

This all came out due to an (apparently) spurious rape accusation. In connection with that investigation, police investigated Barclay's home, including his home computer; they discovered the videos, and of course making use of prostitutes is also illegal. The fact that the investigation pretty much makes the rape accusation self-destruct is probably of little consolation to the erstwhile country commissioner, who turned in his resignation on April 2nd.

And so we see that the fundamentalists have, once again, shot us all in the foot. Here was a good county commissioner, who was doing a good job and was (and is) liked by his friends and co-workers alike. In a sane world, he would have fallen in love with some cute guy in their twenties; they would have both worked at the Electrical Contractor firm (I like to think Barclay's partner would have been the accountant) and would have been married. Barclay would never have been driven to employ prostitutes; he'd have become a successful county commissioner and may even have gone on to higher offices, with his supportive partner/husband/whatever at his side.

But, n…o, thanks to the insistence of the Fundamentalists on subverting morality into their own twisted parody of it, and convincing even non-Fundamentalists that they are right, Barclay was driven underground to a life of furtive (and expensive) sex with paid strangers, with only the flickering afterglow of video recordings afterwards for solace.

Which, by the way, I hope he releases on DVD as soon as the court hearings are over.