BATHROOM BLUES

(Sadly, the headline "Craig's Lust" was already taken by Slate.)

So what to make of Idaho Senator Larry Craig? The man was busted in a Minnesota bathroom for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer, pleads guilty to a lesser offence, then decides to resign his seat. Now he says he's changed his mind and will stay in the Senate and fight to clear his good name.

The politics of all this is pretty astounding. Rumor has it the Republican establishment in Washington leaned on Craig pretty hard to get him to resign. President Bush even called him up after he announced his resignation to tell him he "did the right thing." Now all that has been thrown in to question. Democratic strategists are likely peeing themselves with joy right now.

The law enforcement angle is also rather curious. Are our airports so secure that we can spare personnel to protect the bathrooms from gay people? Just a thought.

But the most fascinating (an nasty) part of this story for most people likely lies in the lurid details of Craig's attempted bathroom tryst. The police report details all the steps Craig allegedly went through to communicate to the officer in the next stall that he was in the mood for luv. They involve a series of foot taps and sticking of hands under the stall divider. (I'm told these are also the steps required to get George Michael's autoraph, but I digress.)

Believe it or not, I was actually somewhat familiar with those signals before this story broke. Back in 1994, I basically read the whole instruction manual on a bathroom wall in a Wyoming rest area. It even gave the days and hours when such activity would likely occur. I knew I should have brought a magazine to read instead. Over the years, I've also heard a few other people make reference to these bathroom signals.

Now that these techniques are pretty much known in the general public, they're not very useful as secret signals. I imagine the first item on the agenda at the next gay meeting will be to come up with some new bathroom signals. (John says the gay meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month at an old costume shop in West Hollywood.)

But the more I ponder this question, the more I reach two stunning conclusions: Larry Craig is innocent, and these bathroom signals are nothing more than an urban legend. Think about it. I got my info from a bathoom wall, and all other references came from straight people. Are these really reliable sources for this kind of information? It seems unlikely.

Let's not forget, the gay community was clever enough to trick us all into singing "YMCA" without us understanding the naughty subtext. Don't you think the gays would be clever enough to keep their best secrets from falling into the hands of a straight-laced Mormon?

It seems much more likely that both Larry Craig and the Minneapolis police officer were performing off a script that the Gay Underground cleverly laid out for them. They wrote instructions on thousands of bathroom walls, then sat back and giggled as closet cases played footsie with undercover cops.

Well played, gays. Well played.