Straight Acting

THE HOTEL

The lobby, my God, the lobby.

“Everlasting Love,” an early disco hit, is booming over the sound
system. The walls and floors of the L-shaped room are covered in beige
and tan marble. Faux-Victorian chandeliers dangle from the ceiling. Huge bronze elephant heads with
gleaming brass tusks top every column, stained-glass panels with
giraffe motifs enclose the bar area, and overstuffed chairs and
banquettes are upholstered in black-and-tan leopard-print velvet. It
looks like all the furniture has been upholstered with Siegfried and
Roy’s old thongs.

There’s some trouble getting the room I requested—968. When I
made the reservation yesterday, I was told that my room request was no
problem. But today, the room is “off-line,” the receptionist informs
me. A pair of stained-glass tigers stares down at me from the wall
behind her. The receptionist is blond and perky, and she doesn’t seem
to suspect anything. She sets about trying to get the room back online
for me and invites me to have a drink in the hotel bar—where the
waiter is wearing a zebra-striped apron—while she works on the
problem. When I return to the reception desk 15 minutes later, a
noticeably cooler receptionist informs me that the room I wanted will
be off-line for the “duration of my stay,” which is only one night.

So I don’t get “the” room—the room where Washington state
representative Richard Curtis (R-La Center), 48, had anal
sex—twice—with Cody Castagna, 26, “a part-time waiter and
porn model,” as Castagna was tagged by the Spokesman-Review.
But I do manage to get a room on the ninth floor—room
957—and the evacuation map on the back of the door shows that 957
is a mirror image of 968. It’s a small room (but pricey, at $300 a
night) with oil paintings of rhinos and elephants and cheetahs; a
flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the bed; a large, beveled mirror
over the bed serving as a headboard; and a large leopard-print
pillow.

I’m in Spokane to retrace Curtis’s footsteps on that fateful night.
But before I can party like a Washington state rep, I need to gather a
few things: lingerie, a sack, some rope, a toy stethoscope, condoms,
and a few items I can not identify.

After the last humiliating detail about Representative Richard
Curtis and his adventures with an admitted male prostitute and alleged
extortionist dribbled out early last week—that would be the
plastic sack police found in Curtis’ room containing rope, a
stethoscope, and other items the police “could not immediately
identify”—I thought to myself, “Well, at least Washington State’s
GOP gay sex scandal had a dignified setting.” Curtis wasn’t busted, for
instance, in an airport bathroom or a public park.

The reported location of Curtis’s undoing, the Davenport Hotel in
downtown Spokane, is a grand hotel in the style of Seattle’s Fairmont
Olympic Hotel. The Davenport opened its doors in 1914, enjoyed several
successful decades, went into decline in the 1960s (along with the rest
of downtown Spokane), and closed its doors in 1985. After several close
calls with the wrecking ball, Walt Worthy, a Spokane developer, bought
the Davenport in 2000 for $6.5 million, poured $36 million into the
hotel, and reopened it to rave reviews in 2002. “With dedication,
taste, and respect for history, [Worthy] has restored the Davenport to
its former grandeur,” reads the essay about the Davenport at HistoryLink.org.

But—I figured this out later—it turns out that Curtis
wasn’t staying at the grand old Davenport Hotel. He was staying across
the street at the brand-new Davenport Tower, a sister hotel that opened
in January of this year. As for Worthy’s lauded sense of taste, well,
it appears to have been fatally struck by an automobile as it attempted
to cross the street. The Davenport Tower, for no discernable reason
whatsoever, is done up in an African safari theme—hence the
elephants, leopards, tigers, giraffes, hippos, and rhinos crowded into
the lobby, the restaurant (The Safari Room), and the guest rooms. Not
even the elevators are spared.

So there was nothing dignified about Curtis’s spectacular pratfall
from grace—not his attire, not his behavior, not even the
setting.

“Man,” I think looking at the mirror behind the bed, “this wouldn’t
look out of place on Aurora Avenue.”

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Until he resigned from the state legislature on October 31, Richard
Curtis represented La Center, Washington, a small town you’ve never
heard of somewhere between Vancouver, Washington, and the state capital
of Olympia. A beefy Republican with a bushy gray moustache, Curtis is a
social conservative. In this context, “social conservative” means, of
course, “antigay.” Curtis voted against adding gays and lesbians to the
state’s antidiscrimination statutes; he voted against domestic
partnerships for gay couples; he voted against gay marriage.

When Curtis spoke to the Columbian, the daily paper in
Vancouver, Washington, before all the details were out, he echoed the
words of Larry Craig. “I am not gay,” Curtis told a reporter from the
Columbian on Monday, October 29. “I have not had sex with a
guy.”

But the morning of Friday, October 26, in room 968 of the Davenport
Tower, Curtis, who was in Spokane attending a retreat with other state
GOP lawmakers at the nearby Red Lion Hotel, told to two detectives from
the Spokane Police Department that earlier that morning he had engaged
in consensual anal sex with a much younger man whom he met in an adult
bookstore. Curtis had called the police after the man, whose name he
never knew, took off with his wallet while Curtis was asleep.

The man later called demanding $1,000—and threatened to out
Curtis as gay if he didn’t pay up.

“[Curtis] only wanted his wallet back and wanted to keep the
incident as low-key as possible,” Detective Tim Madsen wrote in his
report. “If the incident became public, it could cost him his marriage
and career.”

THE MALL

Terry, my boyfriend of 12 years, is from Spokane and pretty happy
about it. In fact, the further he is from Spokane the happier he gets.
But he agreed to join me in his hometown on a Saturday night because,
like me, he assumed we would be staying at the storied Davenport Hotel.
He gets a rude shock when he arrives a few hours after I do.

But I don’t have time to worry about that—I have supplies to
get. Two blocks from the hotel is River Park Square, Spokane’s downtown
shopping mall: Nordstrom, Restoration Hardware, Abercrombie &
Fitch, Macy’s. Built to revitalize the downtown area, River Park Square
seems to have removed what little foot traffic there was in downtown
Spokane from the streets. I pass a dozen or more shuttered storefronts
on my way to the mall.

To River Park Square’s credit, I quickly find a toy stethoscope,
lingerie, some condoms, and a tasteful card for a friend whose mother
recently passed away—and every item comes in a plastic sack, so
that’s taken care of, too. But, alas, there’s no rope for sale at the
mall.

THE DIRTY BOOKSTORE

Sometime after the first day of the GOP retreat wrapped up on the
evening of Thursday, October 25, Curtis drove to Hollywood Erotic
Boutique in Spokane Valley, a neighboring nothing of a town. It wasn’t
Curtis’s first visit to Hollywood Erotic Boutique. According to an
employee quoted in the Spokesman-Review, Curtis had visited
the adult bookstore at least three times in the past month. The
employees had even given him a nickname: “the crossdresser.”

A young man named Cody Castagna was also at the bookstore that
night. Castagna, according to the police report, approached Curtis and
asked him for a cigarette sometime around one in the morning. After
determining that Curtis wasn’t a cop, Castagna asked him if he “wanted
to get together.” Curtis told Castagna that he would not pay for sex
“because that would be prostitution”—well, that’s what Curtis
told the police he told Castagna. But Curtis did offer Castagna $100
“to help him out for gas.” Curtis then gave Castagna his cell-phone
number and left Hollywood Erotic Boutique for a casino near Spokane’s
airport.

Hollywood Erotic Boutique is housed in a crumbling, two-story
building marooned in the endless sprawl of parking lots that
characterize Spokane proper and Spokane Valley. There’s a discount tire
dealership on one side and a plasma center on the other. When my
boyfriend and I walk in, the very first thing we notice is a picture of
Castagna on the wall. “This person is banned from the premises!” reads
the hand-written note tacked above a screen grab from an interview
Castagna did on MSNBC. “No prostitution allowed!”

When I ask about Curtis and Castagna, the friendly, heavy-set woman
behind the counter tells us she just started. The only thing she knows
about Curtis is that he was living a lie.

“And that’s just sad,” she says. “You have to be who you are!”

She tells us about her son—now her daughter, who lives in
California. She had the courage to come out as transgendered.

“And she’s six-foot-three!” she exclaims. “And you’re telling me
Richard Curtis was too scared to come out as a gay man?”

It was at Hollywood Erotic Boutique that Curtis was spotted wearing
“long red women’s stockings and black sequined lingerie,” according to
an employee quoted in the Spokesman-Review. Before meeting
Castagna, employees observed Curtis receiving oral sex from “a man who
appeared to be around 40 and [walked] with a cane.” This may have been
captured on the store’s security video from the night Curtis met
Castagna, a video that is now in the hands of the police and could
ultimately be released to the public.

Despite being described as an “adult bookstore” in every newspaper
account of the Curtis scandal, there aren’t any books for sale at
Hollywood Erotic Boutique. There are hundreds of old DVDs, dildos and
butt plugs, cheap blowup dolls with “O” mouths, and exactly two sad
pieces of lingerie.

A handful of men come and go while we’re standing at the counter
talking with the clerk; clearly the scandal hasn’t been bad for
business. Hollywood Erotic Boutique’s regular customers eye us
suspiciously. Our demeanors aren’t furtive enough, I guess. We’re
obviously together, Terry is dressed a little too stylishly, we didn’t
arrive in a pickup truck—we’re interlopers, openly gay men, and
we’re ruining the vibe.

No one is interested in the merchandise for sale at Hollywood Erotic
Boutique. Every customer who comes through the doors while we’re in the
shop pays $10 and heads immediately up the stairs to the “porn
theaters”—really five small video viewing booths. For $10 you can
stay upstairs for up to six hours.

According to the reviews posted at CrusingForSex.com, the Hollywood Erotic
Boutique is a “very nice, very safe” place to meet men. “This is a
great spot to get a load or dump one,” reads one of the longer reviews.
“It’s mostly straight men and they usually don’t care who sucks their
cock—they just want it sucked… Also, I have met several guys
who would get a room and have a fuckfest.”

Curtis had a room; Castagna was game for a fuckfest.

Before we leave the bookstore, I ask Terry if he wants to slip
upstairs and give me a little head. You know, in the spirit of
following in Curtis’s footsteps.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he says.

“Yes,” I lie. “Of course. I mean, come on.”

THE CASINO

On our way to the casino, we swing by the General Store, a Spokane
institution. Picture a Chubby & Tubby (RIP) on steroids and with
guns. For serious kinksters, a hardware store is a sex-toy
shop—well, Seattle kinksters would love Spokane’s
General Store. Christ, the rope selection alone! We select a nice pack
of soft, blue-and-white nylon rope and toss it in the backseat of our
rental car.

Out of all the pleasures Curtis pursued during his adventures in
Spokane, the hour or two he spent at the Northern Quest Casino in the
middle of the night mystifies me most. Who doesn’t enjoy blowjobs and
buttfucking? As for crossdressing, well, it’s not my thing, but I can
see how it could turn some men on. Rope and stethoscopes? I feel
compelled to admit that I’ve got a few bondage and medical toys at
home.

Perhaps this is a good time to get this on the record: I don’t think
Richard Curtis did anything wrong that night in Spokane. I’m all for
men having sex with other men. I certainly don’t think it should be
illegal for men to wear women’s underwear, or for men to get blowjobs
from other men at dirty bookstores, canes or no canes, lingerie or no
lingerie, nor should it be illegal for men to pay male porn stars for
their time and attention. I also don’t think it should be illegal for
men to marry each other. What makes this case a scandal—besides
the alleged extortion attempt, of course—is that Curtis led
people to believe he thought all those things should be illegal. Just
as Idaho’s Larry Craig would certainly have voted against a bill
decriminalizing toilet sex had one come up for a vote in the U.S.
Senate, Curtis would have voted against a bill that decriminalized
public sex and crossdressing and porn-star renting had it come up for a
vote in the Washington State House of Representatives. I, of course,
would vote to legalize every supposedly “criminal” thing that Curtis
did in Spokane—and ever so much more.

But casinos? I’d vote them out of existence if I had the chance.
Casinos are grim. We’re not three steps into the massive
Northern Quest Casino before I spot her. There’s one of her in every
casino in the country: a little old lady hooked up to an oxygen tank,
feeding coins into a slot machine, a drink in one hand and a cigarette
in the other. (Cigarettes and oxygen tanks? When, I wonder, is one of
these little old ladies going to explode?) I’m beginning to think
casinos plant these women by the doors so that writers like me can dash
in, get the one squalid detail that sums up the whole scene, and dash
back out, without disturbing any of the real gamblers.

Unlike downtown Spokane—deserted despite a boom in condo
development—Northern Quest is packed. The parking lot stretches
for acres in all directions, and we had to hunt for a spot. Once
inside, we have to fight to find an open table. Poker is all the rage
these days, and the crowded poker tables have pride of place in the
middle of Northern Quest’s gambling floor. Terry and I finally find an
empty blackjack table—shoved into a corner, by the bathrooms. We
sit down, buy $100 worth of chips. Fifteen minutes later, our $100
gone, we slip into the bar for a drink. The casino is working its
magic—we are, despite our best efforts, having a blast.

Curtis was at the Northern Quest Casino at 3:00 a.m. when Castagna
called his cell. Castagna asked if Curtis still wanted to get together.
The men arranged to meet back at the Davenport Tower. When both men
arrived, Curtis again told Castagna he wasn’t paying him for sex, just
giving him $100 to “help him out.” Once they got up to Curtis’s room,
Curtis gave Castagna the money. After Curtis—still wearing
women’s lingerie—got fucked, he asked if he could fuck Castagna
without wearing a condom. Castagna told Curtis that unprotected anal
sex was unsafe—well, that’s what Castagna told the police he told
Curtis. When Curtis asked him how much “help” it would take for
Castagna to consent to unprotected sex, the men agreed on a price:
$1,000.

Castagna, according to the police report, was crying when he related
these details.

THE GAY BAR

Richard Curtis spent an awful lot of time in his car the night he
met Cody Castagna. It’s 12.5 miles from the Davenport Tower to the
Hollywood Erotic Boutique, 20 miles from the Hollywood Erotic to
Northern Quest Casino, and another 8.5 miles back to the Davenport
Tower. Spokane’s only gay bar—Dempsey’s Brass Rail—is just
a block from the Davenport Tower. Terry and I walk over to the bar
after returning from the casino.

If Curtis was after a little gay sex, why didn’t he just go to
Dempsey’s?

We arrive around midnight, hoping to catch one of Dempsey’s tragic
drag shows before putting on our own tragic show in front of that
mirrored headboard back in our hotel room. Sitting on a pool table at
the back of the room, my eagle-eyed boyfriend spots some
familiar-looking facial hair—it’s Castagna, in a red T-shirt,
tucking a dollar bill into the bra of a lip-synching drag queen.

Castagna is a star in Spokane’s gay demimonde. He’s blowing kisses,
accepting hugs, and chatting with friends. I get close enough to
eavesdrop and hear Castagna retell the story of that night. He can
relate the story now, it seems, without weeping. He’s laughing.

For some reason, I’m nervous about introducing myself. Castagna
looks rougher in person than he did on MSNBC, like the kind of guy who
might take a swing at someone who pissed him off in a bar. He’s a small
guy, gone to seed a bit, certainly not in the shape he was when he was
making porn (Damon Blows America #3). But he’s charismatic in
that slightly crazed way the kings of small-town gay bars typically
are.

When I finally work up the nerve to introduce myself, Castagna tells
me he can’t talk right now—but he tells me he’ll come and find me
before he takes off. I ask him one quick question: So is Richard Curtis
gay or what? I’m trying to be funny. Castagna looks at me like I’m
crazy.

“Richard Curtis is a freak,” he says. “A big, gay freak.”

We don’t see Castagna again.

THE SEX

Tracing Richard Curtis’s footsteps through the Spokane area was
easy. Now comes the hard part. Bondage is practically vanilla these
days, but I’ve never played with a stethoscope. I listen to my
boyfriend’s heartbeat for a minute, then roll him over and listen to
his buttbeat. And there we give up on playing doctor. I break out a few
items I can not immediately identify. Terry says no dice. Now I’m
feeling pretty silly in the red stockings I bought at Nordstrom early
in the day, which—did I mention this?—I’ve been wearing
under my jeans most of the night. The boyfriend implores me to take
them off, take it all off.

It turns out there’s a limit to how much fun you can have following
in someone else’s footsteps. You can enjoy entertainments that aren’t
your own—playing blackjack, lurking in adult bookstores, chatting
up small-town porn stars—but it’s nearly impossible for a couple
to enjoy kinks that aren’t their own. (And, yes, we have kinks of our
own—plenty.)

We turn on the television.

Sitting up in bed, Terry leaning into me, I start to feel something
unexpected for Curtis: pity. No, not pity. Sympathy. I hopped on an
airplane this morning intending to run around an easily mocked city so
that I could mock the latest GOP elected official exposed as a
hypocrite. And why not? It has been tremendously gratifying to be a gay
person in this country over the last 18 months. After the horrors of
2004—when gays and lesbians were attacked on daily basis by Karl
Rove and George W. Bush—it has been thrilling to watch a party
united, it seems, only by its loathing of gay people, weather the
storms of Ted Haggard, Bob Allen, Larry Craig, and now, Richard
Curtis.

Some people credit the Republicans losing control of Congress in
2006 to the Haggard scandal. I don’t know if that’s true. But GOP sex
scandals have unnerved and alienated the Republican base and shredded
the party’s claim to moral superiority. GOP no longer stands for Grand
Old Party. It’s Gross Old Perverts now.

But I find myself feeling bad for Curtis. What a sad and solitary
figure. He couldn’t risk staying at the same hotel with the rest of the
GOP colleagues, lest they spot him coming and going with young thugs.
So he slunk off to the soulless Davenport Tower alone, before slipping
into the Hollywood Erotic Boutique alone, before heading to the
Northern Quest Casino alone, before heading back to his hotel to have
sex with a man whose name he didn’t know—a man who thought he was
a freak.

I don’t think Curtis is a freak—not on account of his kinks,
anyway. Curtis is a very kinky girl—but guess what? I am, too.
(After writing Savage Love for 16 years, I’m convinced that abnormal is
the norm, and that we’re all kinksters and freaks to greater or lesser
extents.) I would like to go into greater detail about my own kinks to
balance the detail I’m giving on Curtis’s, but 12 years ago when I met
my boyfriend I promised to keep his sex life private. But I can say
this: Thinking back on all the sexual adventures I’ve had with my
boyfriend over the years, I realize how close they’ve brought us, how
central they are to our bond, to our sense of well-being and
satisfaction, to our love for each other.

Then I think of Richard Curtis hiding his kinks, lying to his wife,
sneaking around Spokane, realizing his fantasies with the likes of Cody
Castagna, and I’m even more grateful for what Terry and I have, for
what we’re able to do and be for each other.

How sad for Richard Curtis that he’s never had someone with whom he
could truly share himself—lingerie, stethoscopes, rope, items
that can not be identified, his full name, and all.

THE FLOWER POT

Unable to sleep, I decide to take a stroll to the Washington Street
Bridge, which isn’t too far from our hotel.

There’s a point in the police report where the Curtis scandal jumps
through the looking glass. At 20 minutes to noon on October 26, Curtis
is being interviewed in his room by the detectives. The police are
trying to talk Curtis into allowing them to collect physical
evidence—dirty sheets, a used condom containing Castagna’s semen,
a DNA sample from Curtis. Curtis is reluctant. He doesn’t want to
prosecute the case. He wants to keep this quiet.

“I told Curtis that the toothpaste was already out of the tube,”
Detective Tim Madsen’s report states. “Curtis told me he was just
trying ‘to put the cap back on the tube.'”

Suddenly Curtis’s cell phone rings.

“Curtis tipped the phone so I could hear,” writes Madsen. “I heard a
male voice telling Curtis to leave [the money] in the last flower pot
on the west side [of] Washington Street Bridge at the far north end.
Curtis asked the male how he would get his billfold back. The male told
Curtis that he would drop it off at the front desk of the hotel lobby
after receiving the money.”

Castagna tells Curtis he wants to pick the money up in 25 minutes.
The police tell Curtis to stall—they need time to get
surveillance personnel “to the specific flower pot on the Washington
Street Bridge.”

Curtis stalls long enough for the police to get into position. The
police videotape Curtis slipping an envelope full of money into the
flower pot and a man—not Castagna—picking up the envelope a
few minutes later. The whole thing reads like something out of a bad
spy novel.

The flowerpot is an ugly, concrete box with some tall ornamental
grass growing out it. The Red Lion Hotel—the hotel where
Washington’s GOP legislators were meeting, the place where Curtis was
supposed to be staying—looms over the bridge. I take a picture.
When he dropped off that envelope Curtis was probably wishing he’d
stayed there, and stayed in, that night.

THE STRAIGHT DOPE

Sitting up in bed, I think of an e-mail I received shortly after the
Curtis scandal broke. A friend, a sex researcher, read an item I posted
about Curtis on Slog, The Stranger‘s blog. I titled my post
“XXX-Gay,” a reference to the adult bookstore and the porn films Curtis
purchased for Castagna to watch while the men had sex.

My friend was writing to say it was possible that Curtis was telling
the truth when he said he wasn’t gay.

I scoffed when I read my friend’s e-mail. Curtis was recycling Larry
“I’m Not Gay” Craig’s talking points, for crying out loud. That’s
pretty damn gay. Curtis had been fucked in his ass by a dude. It
doesn’t get any gayer than that.

Does it?

By the time we arrived in Spokane, of course, no one believed Curtis
was anything other than gay. From Fox News to the Seattle Gay
News, the headlines read: “GOP Lawmaker Resigns Over Gay Sex
Scandal.” The Seattle Times, like the woman working at
Hollywood Erotic Boutique, argued that Curtis’ real offense was being a
closeted gay man. The Seattle Times quoted a psychologist who
said, “People are more upset about covering something up, living a lie,
than being gay.”

The gays, myself included, were only too delighted to claim Curtis
for our team—look, another GOP hypocrite! The homophobes were
delighted to let us have him. In the Spokesman-Review, unfunny
“humor” columnist Doug Clark composed a song in Curtis’s honor: “Well,
he says that he’s not gay/He just dresses that way,” go the lyrics.

Only thing is, I don’t know any gay people who dress that way.
Crossdressing for sexual thrills, not for laughs or attention, is an
almost entirely heterosexual phenomenon. Cruisy “adult bookstores” are
primarily patronized by straight and straight-identified men,
according to sex researchers and the reviews on sites like CruisingForSex.com.

And not only did Curtis not act like any gay man I know, he didn’t
act much like a homophobe in the Washington State legislature.

“While Representative Curtis had an anti-gay voting record,”
Washington state senator Ed Murray tells me on the phone, “he was never
an ideologue.” Murray served in the Washington State House of
Representatives with Curtis. Curtis sat on the transportation
committee, which Murray chaired. “He didn’t seem driven by antigay
stuff,” recalls Murray. “He wasn’t one of the jerks. He wasn’t one of
the members so obsessed about the gay issue that you started to wonder
why.”

Openly gay Washington State Representive Jamie Pedersen describes
Curtis as “decent
and kind” in an e-mail. He was one of two

Republicans who, after the [domestic partnership] vote, came across
the floor to shake my hand and congratulate me,” Pedersen recalls.

“Mostly, the whole situation makes me sad,” Pedersen adds. “For his
family, for him, and for a world that makes people feel like they can’t
be who they are.”

So who is Richard Curtis exactly? Sitting in bed at the Davenport,
rope and stethoscope and items that can not be identified strewn about
me, I entertain the possibility that a married man with two kids and a
taste for cock could be bisexual. But not gay? P’shaw. I send my sex
researcher friend an e-mail asking for more info. She forwards my
e-mail to two experts.

The next morning I check my e-mail.

“When I first read about the Curtis affair, I assumed that Curtis’s
principal sexual attraction was to men, that his marriage was
essentially one of convenience,” writes Anne A. Lawrence, M.D., Ph.D.,
a Seattle physician and psychotherapist who specializes in gender
identity issues. “[I interpreted] that his statement about ‘not being
gay’ simply meant that he didn’t identify as gay, even though he was a
man who had sex with men.”

But as more information came in about Curtis, Lawrence arrived at a
conclusion opposite to the one everyone else was arriving at. The
crossdressing, the rope, and, yes, even the anal sex—it all
pointed to Curtis’s heterosexuality.

“The information that has come out about Curtis allegedly wearing
women’s lingerie while engaging in receptive anal intercourse suggests
the alternative hypothesis that Curtis’s principal sexual attraction is
to women but that he is also sexually aroused by the idea of being a
woman himself,” writes Lawrence. Curtis is so into heterosexual sex,
according to this theory, that he wants to experience it from both
sides. “Hypothetically, when being penetrated anally by a man, he might
imagine himself as a woman being penetrated vaginally by a man. This
hypothesis would also be consistent with his statement that he is ‘not
gay.'”

Wait—what?

“A small percentage of men who are principally sexually attracted to
women—perhaps as many as 2–3 percent—are also
sexually attracted to the idea of being women themselves. Canadian
psychologist and sex researcher Ray Blanchard coined the term
‘autogynephilia’ (literally, ‘love of oneself as a woman’) to describe
this phenomenon.”

Autogynephilia most commonly manifests itself in erotic
crossdressing—which is practically unheard of among gay men.

“Roughly 30 percent of male heterosexual crossdressers report some
sexual experience with men, so Curtis would not be unusual if he were,
in fact, a heterosexual crossdresser who engaged in sex with men when
crossdressed.”

Shortly after the e-mail from Lawrence, another arrives from Ray
Blanchard, Head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and Professor of Psychiatry at
the University of Toronto. Blanchard, again, gave autogynephilia its
name. He didn’t want to comment directly on Curtis but was willing to
discuss autogynephilia.

“There is a class of heterosexual men called autogynephiles, who are
sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women,”
Blanchard confirms. “They may act out this fantasy in various ways. One
common way is to dress up as women and seek sex with men. It is not
rare that they employ pornographic movie theaters for this purpose,
although that strategy usually limits them to wearing brassieres

or panties beneath their male clothes.”

Which is precisely what Curtis did.

“The exciting aspect of the men they have sex with is the symbolic
value of the male partner, which enhances their fantasies of being
women,” Blanchard continues.
“Autogynephiles are not interested in
men’s bodies, they rarely or never have sex with men when they are not
crossdressed, and they are being truthful when they state that they are
not gay. In their normal lives, they are unremarkably masculine and
they often have wives or girlfriends.”

But Curtis didn’t seek penetration only; he got a blowjob, he fucked
Castagna—how does that jibe with his desire to be a woman?

“Some autogynephiles will allow or even seek to be fellated or to
perform anal penetration on a partner as part of the interaction,” says
Blanchard. “A penis is, after all, the sexual organ that they have, and
if they want to achieve orgasm as part of the encounter, that is what
they need to have stimulated, one way or another.”

Curtis’s heterosexuality—if he is heterosexual—doesn’t
excuse his antigay voting record, of course. If anything, his
willingness to vote against gay people while indulging in inarguably
gay sex acts—whatever was going on in his head—is less
defensible in light of his potential autogynephilia. Even if Curtis’s
attraction to men was a kink, a means by which he was able to indulge
his fantasies about being a woman himself, having sex with men should
have sensitized him to the issues faced by men who are capable of
loving other men, not just using them.

But it casts Curtis’s actions, and his early statements, in a
different light. It certainly explains the cross-dressing, which is out
of character for a gay man. It also might explain why Curtis didn’t go
to the nearby gay bar, opting instead for a far-off adult bookstore
patronized by straight and “straight” guys. Yes, Curtis is a victim of
the very homophobia that his votes worked to sustain, but he was not,
as Murray says, one of the jerks.

Sitting in bed on the ninth floor of the Davenport Tower, my
boyfriend sleeping beside me, my anger with Curtis—just Curtis,
not Craig or Allen or Haggard—softens somewhat. He’s already lost
so much—his job, his dignity, potentially his marriage, the
respect of his children. Maybe we should let him have his
heterosexuality.

THE MORNING AFTER

“Sure, there are hypocrites everywhere—it’s awful!”

We’ve stopped in the Safari Room for a quick meal before heading to
the airport. When I ask our impossibly cute, dark-haired waitress about
Richard Curtis, she says she doesn’t know all that much about it. But
she knows he was doing one thing at the hotel and another thing in the
legislature.

“It’s like Jodie Foster,” she goes on, smoothing her zebra-striped
apron. “She’s like this big Hollywood liberal and she wants to take our
guns and there she is in her new movie shooting guns! Another
hypocrite, you know?”

“Yeah,” my boyfriend offers, pushing his eggs around on his plate.
“And think of all the actors who have played serial killers, thieves,
and cheaters but disapprove of actual murder, robbery, and
adultery.”

“Yeah,” the waitress says, nodding vigorously. “Can I get you guys
anything else?”

No, we say, we have to head to the airport.

“We’ll see you, then,” she says, smiling. “I hope you enjoyed your
stay in Spokane.”