Senator Craig Likes Bois(e)

I'm not sure there's been a worse-kept secret since power-lesbian Rosie O sang all those awkward "heterosexual" songs about Tom Cruise [shudder], but apparently Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig is gay. Of course, we've all know this since last fall when Senator Craig was outed by blogActive.

Wait, how could Senator Craig (pictured below) be gay? He seems to like cowboys so much!

But now we have some even better evidence: the Craigster was arrested in the restroom at Minneapolis airport for soliciting sex. He pleaded guilty to "disorderly conduct."

Wait, you're telling me that someone who enjoys singing with Paul Shaffer is gay? Maybe it's just a big misunderstanding.


If only. Apparently,

the officer said Mr. Craig had tapped his foot, in what the officer called a known signal to engage in lewd conduct, and had also brushed his foot against the investigator’s and waved his hand under the stall divider several times before the officer showed him his badge. [NYT]

As a long-time homosexual who occasionally hangs out in very gay restrooms, Fosco well knows the mating rituals of the silver troll. I hate to break it to middle America, but Senator Craig wasn't trying to borrow some toilet paper. He wanted to borrow some cock.

If you want some more delicious irony, surf on over to this story on Wonkette to enjoy how Larry Craig supporters, the "Idaho Values Alliance," are so worried about a threat to our families: "Airport restrooms have become so popular that men looking for anonymous sexual trysts with other men have advertised their airport availability on Craigslist." It leads one to wonder if that's Craigslist or Craig's list.

Is Girlfriend Larry going to go all McGreevey on us? (And did Senator Craig kill any teen vagrants?) Fosco had to know, and so he went to the source:


The Automated LarryBot informs me that Senator Craig prioritizes the concerns of Idahoanianists first, but I'll let you know when he gets back to me (I'm sure it will be soon). Of course, if he comes out in his reply it will be another Fosco Lives! Exclusive.

Actually, isn't the real scandal here that Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is using undercover cops to entrap lonely homosexuals? There isn't anything else that cops could do at a major international airport? I think the gays should boycott this airport. You with me, gays?

Happy Anniversary!

Fosco Lives! has been around now for exactly six months. As Fosco is a homosexual and therefore unable to be trusted with that most sacred of bonds (i.e., marriage), he isn't quite sure of the appropriate etiquette for celebrating a six month anniversary. Is fellatio involved? I sure hope so.

Or perhaps a brief post about the tiny (yet non-zero) impact that Fosco Lives! has had on the blogosphere in the last six months. How about that?

Most Popular Post: the all-time most popular post on Fosco Lives! is Fosco's meditation on Playboy's "Girls of the Big 12" pictorial. Read it here. Why has it been so popular? Several reasons:

• Composer John Mackey linked to it from his blog and recommended it to his numerous loyal readers.
  
• For a month after the publication of that Playboy issue, it got a hit a day from .edu domains in Texas and Oklahoma searching for "Playboy" and "Girls of the Big 12."
  
• At least once a week, this post gets a hit from someone searching for Tasia Bauman (NSFW). Clearly, websurfers want to see more naked cowgirls (or at least this one). It's fun to watch the domains from which these searches are conducted: the US State Department (could it have been lesbian Condi?), gillette.com, and (interestingly) quakeroats.com. Do you think Quaker is looking to replace spokesgrampa Wilford Brimley with some sort of nude rodeo? Signs point to yes.
  
• Even now, aat least once a day, this post gets a hit from someone who is searching Google for the phrase "shaved pubes." The strange thing is that, much of the time, the searcher actually clicks through to this post and reads at least a portion of it. Most of these searches come from foreign domains, which maybe sort of explains it. But, I have to ask: is it really so hard to find shaved pubes on the internet? Isn't there an easier way than to route through this page? I love the traffic and all, but jeez... Who doesn't know where to find shaved pubes online? Ten-year-olds?

Best Press: Fosco's post on Gay American and former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey (yes, that is his official portrait above). Read it here. The day that McGreevey's tell-all book came out (snicker), AOL Cityguide featured a link to Fosco's post on both its "North Jersey" and "Washington DC" pages. See screen cap below:



That "Sexy Back?" link takes you right to moi. Well, I thought it was cool.

Most Validating: Fosco's review of a Diamanda Galas concert in Santa Cruz (which you can read here). The review got picked up by the official Diamanda Galas website and is prominently featured in the Press page on that site. Now if only I can get Matthew Barney to read some of my reviews of his work...

Hungriest Readers: for several weeks last summer, Fosco was eating at San Francisco restaurants recommended by perpetually chirpy chefette Rachael Ray. Read Fosco's reviews of Chow and Bocadillos. Fosco's reviews were included in the weekly "RR Roundup" conducted by the surprisingly charming blog Everything Rachael Ray. For those two weeks, Fosco got an interesting mix of new readers and he enjoyed the chance to scandalize Rachael Ray lovers with references to Lindsay Lohan's vagina.

That's probably enough self-congratulation for now, so allow me to say "Thank You" to all of you who read Fosco Lives! You have made the first six months a hoot and I look forward to the next six.

Maybe next year, Joyce...

The first few weeks of October are both exciting and frustrating for Fosco. As the Nobel Prizes begin to trickle out of Stockholm, he has to put with the almost daily announcements of useless awards (like Physics or Medicine) until they finally get around to the Literature award.

Fosco loves the Nobel Prize in Literature (as he loves most other literary awards). Actually, the thing that Fosco loves most about the Nobel Prize in Literature is handicapping it. Who will win? Who should win but won't? Who might win but shouldn't?

To tell you the truth, Fosco's favorite thing about the Nobel Lit Prize is the perrenial presence of Skeletor, er, Joyce Carol Oates on the media's "shortlist." Yes, our JCO is Literature's Susan Lucci, tapped by both the newsmedia and the betting books (yes, you can bet on this!) as one of the heavyweights for the last several years. JCO's annual candidacy has even led the editor of the JCO infosite to provide this tart reply. Personally, I doubt that JCO will ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, for the following reasons:

• She teaches at Princeton with previous Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (Winner in 1993). How many Literature Nobels are they going to throw at Princeton?
  
• She's written somewhere in the neighborhood of, oh say, 6500 books and yet, NO ONE I know has read one of her novels. (Fosco has read more of her novels than he would care to admit, but all against his will. Ask him what that means, sometime.)
  
• She's written (by a conservative estimate) about 9,740 books. Every time you look away, another book by her appears on the "New Books" table. Can the Nobel Committee really come to terms with that kind of oeuvre? Do they care to?
  
• Although she's written roughly 4200 books, a close reading reveals that she's actually written the same 5 books, 840 times each. That's something I expect the Swedish Academy to notice. Eventually.
  
• There's that whole mess with her accusing James McGreevey of killing all those teen vagrants. Stockholm doesn't really like teen sex killings.

So who did win? Some Turkish guy. Actually, to be more accurate, it's some Turkish guy who has faced political repression (a lil' bit) in his home country. Huh. Well, at least the Nobel Committee isn't predictable or anything.

So who should have won? Actually, I'm fine with Pamuk winning. I've never read his stuff, but it seems to review well. I mean, if Margaret Atwood thinks it's okay who am I to argue? (Atwood herself is something of a gunner for the Prize, eh?)

Next year, I'd love to see it go to Salman Rushdie (especially if the Academy really wants to make a statement about creative freedom) or Haruki Murakami (cuz I like him).

Actually the writer I think most deserves it (as he is certainly the best living writing working in English) is Philip Roth. However, he will never win it. Never. Why not? Because I don't see another American Jewish man (who writes about aging American men) winning. It turns out that Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize that should have, thirty years later, gone to Roth. Time plays such cruel jokes.

Don't worry, Joyce--you still have that cushy gig at Princeton, even if Toni makes fun of you behind your back. And, as this post proves, you don't need to have a Nobel to do that...

Is Mark Foley just being misread?

So there's this (now former) US Representative Mark Foley who seems to have conducted inappropriately sexual IM conversations with underage (male!) Congressional pages. This is a seamy story with many deliciously juicy angles, including:

• he was a high-ranking member of the Republican Congressional leadership.
  
• his legislative priorities were focused on "championing laws against sexual predators" (NYT)
  
• the House Republican Leadership may have known about his antics for almost a year (and kept it hush-hush).
  
• he is, apparently, that rarest of unicorns: A Gay Republican.

Is it possible to drown in irony? Glub, glub, glub...

But, perhaps we're jumping to conclusions here. As Fosco knows, IM can be a tricky way to communicate. Unfortunately, it is often the only way for one to communicate with anyone under 20. Before Fosco hired his full-time personal assistant Geoffrey, he often employed several teenage interns of his own. And let me tell you, there were some IM-related misunderstandings--often stemming from the fact that specific lines of text were taken out-of-context by concerned parents, FBI agents, etc. Is it possible that the Liberal Media is ignoring parts of these messages--the parts that would reveal that they were actually intended innocently?

To speak to that question, Fosco will present some of his own IMs to his teen boy interns that have been intentionally misinterpreted by his enemies, typically by refusing to notice the second half of each IM conversation:

Case 1
FOSCO: what r u wearing?
CASEY04: tshirt and shorts
FOSCO: love to slip them off of u
FOSCO: cuz its gonna snow
FOSCO: and if u get sick i cant give u time off
FOSCO: put on a coat

Case 2
FOSCO: i want u on all fours on my rug
TIMMY_S: huh?
FOSCO: i lost a contact. i cant see it.

Case 3
FOSCO: bring me ur underwr
HOTWRESTLER06: why?
FOSCO: i wanna sniff em
FOSCO: cuz i thk i may be allergic to ur laundry detergent
FOSCO: and i have to find out before i get hives agin

Case 4
FOSCO: show me ur dick
FOSCO: cheney
FOSCO: action figure
FOSCO: sorry my im is acting screwy
FOSCO: but id love to see that action figure
FOSCO: i hear its funny

Case 5
FOSCO: wanna go to fcuk?
SPICY_TEEN17: u wanna fuck?
FOSCO: no fcuk = french connection uk. its my fave store and i nd u to buy me a coat
FOSCO: cuz its gonna snow

So let's not judge Rep. Foley until we get the FULL transcripts of these "sexually explicit" IMs. Fosco would hate to see another innocent homosexual brought down by a vicious media attack (like how Joyce Carol Oates alleged that James McGreevey killed all those teen vagrants). Shame on you, Liberal Journalist/Short-Story Writer Media Complex!

"My truth is that I am a gay American."

Ah, those famous words. Words that will be someday be etched onto the walls of the James McGreevey Monument in Trenton. Or, at the very least, scribbled on the wall of a bathroom stall at Rest Stop 59 (maybe with a phone number?).

Former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey's book is out today. It's titled The Confession and, judging for the excerpts printed in the Sunday Times, it is indeed chock full of confessing.

Here's a naughty bit:

I visited bookstores in New York and New Jersey and had sex in the small booths there until I became too famous to risk discovery. I lurked around parkway rest stops, exchanging false names and intimacies with strangers.

And here's another:

Moonlight squinted through the stained-glass windows into our garden, catching an inviting eye or a face stretched in ecstasy. I looked forward to my visits there, sometimes two or three a week. I quickly learned whom to approach and whose advance to wait for, when to move quickly, which posture said “no thanks” and which said “please.”

Oh yeah... now who's bringing sexy back?

[By the way, did anyone actually edit this book? "Moonlight squinted?" Ugh.]

And about all that corruption (you know, that non-gay reason he had to resign)? Well, that's mostly his staff's fault:

I tried to stay as naïve about this horse trading as possible. But I allowed my staff to intimate things to donors.

Intimate things? Like what, Jim? That you could get them Streisand tickets?

Strangest of all, it seems that the book doesn't even acknowledge that McGreevey picked up and killed all those teen vagrants. [Hint: follow the link, read the story, laugh at the joke.]

Seriously, though, isn't it amazing that the Oates story appeared only one month after McGreevey resigned? That woman works fast.