Disappointing

There has been quite the kerfuffle this week over revelations that Cpl. Matt Sanchez, a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps who was fêted at last week's CPAC gathering in Washington where Ann Coulter yet again opened her hateful piehole and let the vileness that is herself come spewing forth, used to act in gay porn films. While the usual right-wing blowhards have yet to express an opinion on Cpl. Sanchez's past, the same cannot, unfortunately, be said for Left Blogistan, which has mostly been critical of Sanchez's "hypocrisy" in being a conservative.

Personally, I find this entire affair disappointing on multiple levels. For starters, it's hard to see how Cpl. Sanchez is going to keep his position in the Marine Corps, now that the fact that he appeared in upwards of 30 pornographic videos (almost all of them exclusively gay) has been splashed all over the media. Unfortunately for the probably soon-to-be-ex Cpl. Sanchez, "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" is still in effect and still routinely being ignored--and it's kind of hard to ignore when every news outlet and whole swathes of the blogosphere are talking about one particular servicemember who used to act in porn. Given the military's reaction a year ago to revelations that seven members of the 82nd Airborne had engaged in sex for money on a gay website, I have to think things are not likely to go well for Cpl. Sanchez.

And that, as I've said all along, is a crying shame. Can someone please explain to me exactly how having acted in gay porn makes one unfit to be a member of the military? Instead of wasting time and money (and manpower) by hunting down and kicking out servicemembers for having sex on camera, it would make a great deal more sense (at least to this blogger) to pay our troops enough that they didn't have to find creative ways of making ends meet while they're putting their asses on the line in support of the Shrubbery's asinine and endless wars of distraction.

Another disappointment was the rush to judgement on our side of the blogosphere. Now as it turns out, a lot of the accusations hurled at Cpl. Sanchez in the last couple of days seem to have some basis in fact. But nobody waited for the facts to come out before making the accusations, and I call that dirty pool. Our side is supposed to be better than that, and we dropped the ball.

Particularly disappointing was Sanchez's tepid, wishy-washy response to l'affaire Coulter:

JMG: What do you think of Ann Coulter, especially regarding her "faggot" remark at CPAC? What did Ann say to you?

SANCHEZ: I, personally wouldn't have used the word faggot in public like that. That said, Ann made a joke and that's just what she does. I wouldn't want her right to speak breeched in any way. The complaints from all these pissed off people is hilarious.

Given Sanchez's reaction to epithets hurled at him because of his military service and minority status, I would have liked to see a stronger response here. Calling John Edwards a faggot was not a joke, and while it is absolutely what Coulter does, that doesn't excuse the behavior or make it acceptable. Sanchez is correct that Coulter has a First Amendment right to be as hateful as she wants to be in public. However, we "pissed off people" have just as much of a right to be outraged at what comes out every time she opens her sewer of a piehole, and we also have both etiquette and common sense on our side to boot. It is particularly disingenuous that the rightwingnuts, who are forever berating liberals and Democrats for our alleged lack of civility, never seem to feel that incivility is bad when it comes from the mouths of Coulter, Gingrich, Dobson, Falwell, Limbaugh, or any of the other conservative icons. Double standard, anyone?

I don't quite know what to make of Sanchez's (possibly self-serving) disavowal of his sexuality:

JMG: Do you consider yourself gay?

SANCHEZ: Boyfriends: 0 Fiance: 2 Wife: 1. I'd say I'm pretty bad at being gay.

Now it is not unheard-of in the gay community for heterosexual or bisexual men to act in gay porn, so the fact that Sanchez did so is not automatically an indication of his true sexual orientation. I haven't seen any of his oeuvre, but my guess would be that he preferred taking the active role, as most heterosexual men in gay porn do. Though most of the heterosexuals in gay porn don't typically have quite as extensive a career as Sanchez did. He worked for a number of different studios, under at least two noms de porn, and appears in more than 30 different titles according to several sources. From what I've heard, it's not uncommon for studios to schedule their top performers for dozens of films in a year, trying to make as much money off of them before the audience moves on to younger and fresher pastures--but 30+ films in one year is stretching the limits of credibility and rationality.

And then there's the fact that one of the bloggers commenting on the Sanchez incident had a personal relationship with him and says "Based on my acquaintance with Sanchez a good 18 years ago, he was pretty good at being gay. Apparently what he's very bad at is accepting it."

I don't want to put myself in the position of telling anyone else what his/her "real" sexual orientation is, but given what I know about human sexuality, I do have to think that it is implausible at the very least that Sanchez could have been acting in gay porn, dating other men, and at least according to some accounts, working as a male escort, without there being some level of attraction and interest on his part. It does seem to be the norm for many porn stars to escort on the side, but if Sanchez had been acting in gay porn only for the money or to scratch an itch to walk on the wild side, it's doubtful that he would have wanted to carry that over into other spheres of his life.

And I'm totally not buying what he dismissively says about his career in porn at his own site:

I don’t like porn, it reduces the mind, flattens the soul. That’s not hypocrisy talking, that’s experience. If I started off with liberal leanings, being on a gay porn set should have been heaven. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is projected. How does a conservative trace his roots to such distasteful beginnings? Like all followers of a cult, it’s tough to figure out when you stopped believing in the party-line, but I can tell you that by the time I finished my summer tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers only interested in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high. ...With so many experiences since the last George Bush was in power, you’ll have to forgive me for not listing a summer job in my resume, so many years later. It’s just a part of my past, and like anyone who reflects on the past realizes, it contributes to who I am today. No apologies, just recognition. No running away, just moving forward.

I'm sorry, but "porn star" is not a career that most people aspire to. For Sanchez to expect me to believe that he took a "summer tour of the major studios" just on a whim or as a means of making some money that he couldn't get any other way is stretching credibility well past its breaking point. Anybody who's paid any attention at all over the last couple of decades has heard plenty of stories of exploitative goings-on in pornography, and consequently I find Sanchez's dewy-eyed innocent act a little hard to swallow (absolutely no pun intended). And if he was sufficiently interested in having sex with other men to want to do so on camera, it's difficult to understand how one summer would be enough to sour him on the experience--not to mention how he could have found the time and energy to perform in 10 or more films per month. No, Sanchez's words above have a considerable flavor of faux remorse about them--someone who has been caught with his hand in the metaphorical cookie jar and while he's not sorry about sneaking cookies, he's terribly sorry that he was caught doing so. His prose is a little too de rigueur, and hits a few too many of the standard wingnut talking points, for me to be willing to take it at face value.

And that, I think, is the most depressing thing of all about this sordid affair. Sanchez had every right in the world, whatever his sexual orientation might be, to work as a porn star. There's nothing shameful in that, or there shouldn't be--he was simply doing something that most human beings do, except that he was doing it in front of an audience and on camera. That's not anything that anyone ought to have to be ashamed of, and neither should anybody who has bought and enjoyed Sanchez's oeuvre. Porn is a huge industry, with tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues each year. I think I can safely make the claim that most Americans have seen some porn somewhere at some time, and most of those who have probably enjoyed it. But as with just about anything else involving sex and sexuality in this country, we have this huge guilt complex about it. I stand by my rule, which is that whatever two or more consenting adults may choose to do in private is their own business--and that includes being filmed or watched engaging in intimate behavior for the enjoyment of other consenting adults who choose to watch those acts in the privacy of their own homes or other private settings.

It will be interesting--and probably depressing, too--to watch the fallout from these revelations. There's little doubt in my mind that the Marines will be severing all ties with Cpl. Sanchez in the not-too-distant future, and that's a crying shame. I also fully expect that any number of the conservatives he says have been courting him and offering him their support are going to begin covertly moving away from him, lest they get any of his gay porn cooties on them and piss off their wingnut supporters.

Comments

[Mustang Bobby]

I also think he's being incredibly naive about his welcome into the conservative community. He may believe that all is forgiven, but I'm willing to bet that they're going to keep him at arm's length once the fifteen minutes have passed.

And while I'm sorry he'll be drummed out of the Marines, he had to know that he was putting that at risk when he made the choice to be in the films. Like it or not, those are the rules. If he's as straight as he says he is, then he would have put nothing on the line if he had just done his job as a soldier. He chose to be in those films; gay soldiers, however, don't choose to be gay.

[Michael]

It's not clear from what I've read that he was thinking about enlisting when he made those films nearly 20 years ago. But yeah, he should have known there was the possibility they'd come back to bite him in the ass when he did enlist in 2001. On that point he gets no sympathy from me, but it does still bite that the military is willing to let an apparently committed, skilled soldier go just because he used to get paid to fuck other men on film.

I share your suspicions that the conservacons are going to drop him like the proverbial hot potato once the spotlight is off. Though he did say he met Jeff Gannon at the CPAC shindig, too, though he didn't speak to him. So maybe they'll keep him around as another bit of window-dressing to prove their open-mindedness. (Gag.)

[Incertus]

he had to know that he was putting that at risk when he made the choice to be in the films

The films were old news and predated his time in the service. He had to know he was at risk when he made the choice to try to become a media darling and hang out with the Coulters of the world, and that's why I can't bring myself to feel too sorry for him. If this helps get rid of DADT, great--it's a shitty law and needs to be gone ten years ago.