Sanchez Update

I'm never sure if y'all go back to previous posts, because I do sometimes update them. This one, however, got bigger than I had expected.

Finally got a clear link to the post I'd been looking for. From Max Blumenthal:

There is of course nothing inherently wrong with Sanchez being a gay porn star or a male escort. His past is only notable because he chose to join a movement that exploits anti-gay sentiment for political gain. Coulter’s now-famous “faggot” remark was not an aberration, but rather a symbol of the politics of resentment that propels the conservative movement and its elected Republican surrogates; a reflection of the bigotry conservatives have sought to write into the Constitution through the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment. The ascendant “family values” wing of the right is also responsible for sabotaging legislation allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces, a maneuver that may now spell the end of Sanchez’s career.

Blumenthal gets it pretty much right, although I tend to shy away from psychoanalyzing people I don't know, much less entire political movements. For that matter, I don't usually psychoanalyze people I do know.

It is interesting, however, to note this comment from John Aravosis:

Anyway, Alan Colmes of Hannity & Colmes was kind enough to send me a clip of his interview yesterday with Sanchez on his radio show. Sanchez claims, among other things, that he's not gay, and that his male prostitution clients weren't gay either. He also said that he hadn't done gay porn or prostitution in 15 years. Holmes corrected him, pointing out a "massage" ad for Sanchez' services placed only 3 years ago. I'd also point out that IMDB says that Sanchez' last movie was 1999, that's 8 years ago, not 15.

It really is a Ted Haggard moment. Not only is he not gay, but his clients aren't, either. Get serious. How many straight guys go out looking for the services of a male hooker? And how many male hookers with a male clientele are really into women? This, of course, ties into the whole Christianist "repentance" thing. You can do whatever you want, as long as you repent at some point -- like when you see an opportunity to make more money posing as a poster boy for the anti-gay right. This free pass is, of course, only available to conservative Republicans, and only if they're approved by James Dobson. Democrats and Rudy Giuliani are damned for eternity.

And, harking back to the hypocrisy trope, I think there's more than a whiff of it here. It's a fascinating study of the interplay of denial and projection. Let's go back to this quote from Sanchez:

There's something about the beleaguered gay psyche that wants to prove to the world that everyone is just as messed up as they are. So, they start off with the term hypocrite and work their way backwards looking for signs of deviant behavior in hopes of discovering some type of bastard kinship. That's why I've had the term self-loathing thrown at me so often. The gay community eats its own in a frenzied hope of self-serving fulfillment.

Offhand, I'd say his information about the "beleaguered gay psyche" is decades out of date. But then, most of us don't deny being gay, especially when we've been making our living from it. And considering where his support is coming from, referring to those attacking him as having beleaguered psyches is only to be expected -- after all, that's what his party wants to maintain. Let's face it, "deviant behavior" is something that the right likes to spotlight -- in other people. (I guess he really is a right-winger.) In case you haven't gotten it yet, the only reason that the left is spotlighting Sanchez' history is what many see as the hypocrisy integral to his adoption of the self-styled "conservatives" and their politics of bigotry. We've been used as the boogeyman for a couple of decades now, and Sanchez is not only buying into it, he's coming out in favor of it. Of course, the prose does veer toward the purple -- the last sentence is up there on the "dark and stormy night" scale. And looking at it again, I'm not sure what it means, if anything.

This, from his Salon piece, just puts the icing on the cake:

Instead, those who complain about wire-tapping reserve the right to pry into my private life and my past for political brownie points.

Sorry, honey, but if you're waving your dick around on the silver screen, you can hardly call it your "private life." Or, as Nitpicker puts it:

Malkin, who initially wrote that CPAC "should do more extensive background research before handing out an honor with Jeane Kirkpatrick's name on it," has now decided that liberals are "hate-filled" because someone "outed" his "gay porn past." For the record, "outing" is a term traditionally reserved for times when someone uncovers a secret life someone else has been carefully hiding. It's hard to argue that Sanchez was "outed" when you can go buy reminders of his past for $29.95 at Randy Bottom's House of Video.

Let me put it this way: Sanchez denies being gay and bitches about those who "outed" him. He calls his critics vicious, hateful, messed-up. He defends Ann Coulter, who calls a presidential candidate a "faggot," with the comment that "she was making a joke."

Do I really need to connect the dots?

(Just to keep the right-wing victims happy, here's a "vicious, vitriolic" post from Cliff Schechter at AmericaBlog. [Not really, but you'll just have to make do.])