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| In Defense of the Lewd | |||||||
| A pending law in Louisiana would send people who have sex in public to jail. Our columnist thinks lawmakers should stay out of our bedrooms—even if our bedrooms are in the streets of New Orleans | |||||||
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| June 2 — This is a bad time for public sex. |
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LAST MONTH, THE Louisiana House of Representatives easily passed a bill that stiffens existing penalties for people who engage in public sex. The Senate is expected to pass the bill this week and the governor will likely sign it into law days later. All this legislative activity is a result of a crusade by a camcorder-carrying Christian conservative who videotaped what he calls public “orgies” during last year’s Southern Decadence festival, the annual “Gay Mardi Gras” that takes place on Bourbon Street around Labor Day. Rev. Grant Storms lived up to his surname by sending copies of the tape to lawmakers. Newspapers have described this tape as a “smoking gun” of sexual deviance—a 15-minute loop that captures the most intimate sex acts being carried out for all to see. It’s powerful stuff, apparently. After seeing the tape, Rep. Danny Martiny, a Republican from New Orleans suburb, drafted a bill that would increase the penalty for public sex—which is already illegal, not that you can tell sometimes on Bourbon Street. Specifically, Martiny’s bill requires a mandatory 10-day jail sentence to anyone engaging in “vaginal, oral or anal” sex for the “purpose of gaining the attention of the public.” Martiny admitted that his bill doesn’t cover “people having drunken sex in the backseat of a car” (hear, hear!) and it certainly doesn’t cover women who flash their breasts during the Mardi Gras celebrations (had he banned that, millions of people would have been compelled to boycott Louisiana, just as African-Americans shunned South Carolina over the Confederate flag controversy a few years ago). Of course, Martiny’s bill is a no-brainer if you’re a legislator—the public morals equivalent of a non-binding resolution showing “support” for our troops. When the bill was up for a hearing before Martiny’s committee, no one spoke against it. Not even the ACLU bothered to put itself on the record of favoring public sex (which is why I’m burning my ACLU card as soon as I finish writing this sentence). The way I see it, any infringement on public sex is an infringement on my right as an American to watch public sex! Besides, isn’t busting people for public sex on Bourbon Street a little like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500 or blaming earned runs on the Mets pitching staff? Doesn’t New Orleans exist as America’s safety valve, the place where otherwise straight-laced people can go to witness things that they’d never see at the mall or on Main Street, to stay out late, to drink too much or maybe even—oh, I don’t know—have public sex with a stranger while other strangers shout encouragement? Regardless of my humble opinion on the matter, the bill passed the full House by a 102-1 vote—all on the strength of Storms’s tape. Clearly—in the interests of journalism, I assure you—I needed to see this footage. I called up Storms, but when he hedged when I told him I needed the tape overnighted, I offered to pay the $20 postage. No big deal. I mean, I spent $29.99 to download the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee wedding video, so obviously I was willing to spend whatever it takes for primo amateur porn action, right? I had the tape in my hot little hands 18 hours later, but Martiny cautioned me. “There is not a person around who would look at this tape and say it is acceptable,” Martiny told me. Seconds after popping in the tape, I found myself in full agreement with Rep. Martiny. No one should ever send out a tape with such low production values! I mean, for one thing, Storms’s tape depicts the “Gay Mardi Gras” as merely a bunch of bored gay men standing around. If I hadn’t known what I was watching, I might have thought it was footage from a casting call for extras for “Will & Grace.” And as any producer of even a low-rent “Girls Gone Wild” video will tell you, you can’t just stand on a corner and hope to catch a glimpse of some disgusting, vile and totally gratifying public sex act. You have to get the camera into the center of the action in hopes of encouraging the drunken libertines towards an even greater level of public lewdness. Storms is clearly a wallflower. Desperate to catch someone in mid-debauch, Storms takes full advantage of his camcorder’s zoom feature, peering into a gay strip club where a man is shown from the rear dancing slowly wearing only a G-string. I thought for sure that when the dancer turned around, Storms would have his first evidence of serious depravity, but instead, the G-string held everything—and there was a lot to hold—well in place. You could see more flesh on a beach. This was suggestive, certainly, but not debauchery. In fact, if I’d paid a cover charge at that strip club, I would be calling Danny Martiny for some legislative help. Things finally heated up on the tape. In one scene, a man was seen walking down the street in a Satan costume with his rear end entirely exposed. Someone in the legislature might want to consider a law against such costumes, but my feeling is that the costume itself is a powerful deterrent to crime. Indeed, if the actual Satan’s buttocks are really as flabby and unappealing as this man’s, just knowing that life in Hell means an eternity of staring at such flesh would guarantee civic good behavior. The climax of the tape is a brief scene of a man bestowing a particular sexual favor on two men at once. This is meant to be the “Aha!” moment, but it ends up being fairly mundane. On Bourbon Street in the middle of Southern Decadence, the man on his knees would’ve drawn more public attention if he’d been screaming support for President Bush’s $800-billion tax cut. But on the tape, this type of oral gratification failed to rise to Martiny’s “attention of the public” criterion. In the end, what I found most shocking about the video is how little hair there is in the gay community today. As the author of the international best seller* “Hair: Mankind’s Historic Quest to End Baldness,” this kind of thing excites me. I mean, who knew that so many bald men chose to shave their scalps? My book richly documented how many balding men were “taking back” their baldness by shaving—but most of my evidence came from the black community. So, as you can imagine, I was quite exhilarated watching Storms’s video. Also shocking were just how many ugly homosexuals there are. I guess popular culture—think Will of “Will & Grace” or Hank Azaria’s chisel-chested character in “The Birdcage”—had tricked me into thinking that all homosexual men are all Greek gods. But watching Storms’s film made it clear that the percentage of ugly people in the gay community is roughly equivalent to that of the rest of the population. |
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I called my gay friend (who is beginning to think I befriended him solely for journalistic purposes), who confirmed that, indeed, social situations in his world are sometimes just as dull as Storms’s video depicted, despite the prevailing notion that homosexuals are having a lot more fun than the rest of us. And he definitely confirmed that gay or straight, no man who weighs more than 200 pounds looks good in a sleeveless tank top. Even an organizer of Southern Decadence confirmed that gay life—even in New Orleans—ain’t as raucous as it’s depicted. “I haven’t seen any public sex at Southern Decadence,” promoter Rip Naquin told me. “Now, maybe Storms was taping at three in the morning, but I’m never out that late.” I asked Naquin, since when is 3 a.m. late during the middle of the “Gay Mardi Gras”? “Listen, I’m almost 50. I need my rest. When you live in New Orleans—as opposed to being a visitor—you gotta regulate yourself or you’ll never survive. I need my sleep.” Law or no law, it sounds like good, old-fashioned debauchery is on the run—especially given Storms’s vow to return to the French Quarter for more videotaping this Labor Day. “We’ll go in with camcorders and Bibles and dare those homosexuals to turn our city into Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. If Storms’s first videotape is any indication, it doesn’t look like too many gays will bother to accept the challenge. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv. * His book was a bestseller within the Kuntzman family. © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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