Yet another Republican falls victim to yet another gay sex scandal
Given the Republican sex scandals of 2006, it seemed reasonable to assume 2007 would be a little quieter. No such luck.
Examples like these keep popping up. The headline is a real attention-grabber: “Cross-dressing state lawmaker blackmailed following late night tryst.”
State Representative Richard Curtis says he’s not gay, but police reports and court records indicate the Republican lawmaker from southwestern Washington dressed up in women’s lingerie and met a Medical Lake man in a local erotic video store which led to consensual sex at a downtown hotel and a threat to expose Curtis’ activities publicly.
A search warrant unsealed Tuesday morning disclosed that State Representative Richard Curtis (R – La Center) had sex in his room at the Davenport Tower with a man identified as Cody Castagna, 26, of Medical Lake, who he met at the Hollywood Erotic Boutique on October 26th.
Curtis, according to a search warrant unsealed Tuesday, went to the Hollywood Erotic Boutique on East Sprague on October 26th at approximately 12:45 a.m. The store clerk, who had talked with Curtis, referred to him as “The Cross-Dresser” and said that during their conversations he confirmed he was gay and was married with children at home.
During his visit to the video store Curtis was observed wearing women’s lingerie while receiving oral sex from an unidentified man in one of the movie viewing booths inside the store.
Depending on who you believe, Curtis either paid $1,000 for gay sex with Castagna or Castagna tried to blackmail Curtis into paying $1,000 for his silence.
It’s quite a sordid tale.
Long story short…
Unsolicited advice from TPM to closeted Republican politicians: if you offer to pay a guy $1000 to have sex with you, don’t try to wriggle out of paying the thousand dollars.
More advice: if you get into a payment dispute with the guy you paid to have sex with you, contacting the authorities to get them involved to hassle the guy is a very bad idea.
Also, some metaphors just won’t take you to a good place. From the Columbian’s new article on Washington state legislator Richard Curtis (R) …
Spokane Police Detective Tim Madsen wrote in his report that Curtis wanted to keep the whole incident quiet. At one point, Madsen told Curtis that “the toothpaste was already out of the tube.”
“Curtis told me he was just trying to put the cap back on the tube,” Madsen wrote. “I told Curtis that the suspect may victimize other people in the future, and Curtis acknowledged that part of his job was to protect people in the state of Washington. … Curtis said he wished he would have just paid the additional money to the suspect because he didn’t wish the case to be prosecuted. If the incident became public, it could cost him his marriage and career.”
Yes, paying the additional money may have been wise.
These examples really have been piling up this year, haven’t they?
Cocktober just HAD to go out with a bang. Sweet schadenfreude.
Isn’t the Republican frontrunner also a cross-dresser who gets a little too much attention from men (like Donald Trump)?
Oh Ruuuudyyyy…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IrE6FMpai8
This is sadly proving that the Repubs protest too much considering how rabid these folks (yes folks, Dick’s a family values guy) are about defending marriage and protecting kids and censoring sex in all forms.
Imagine the headlines if many social conservative Repubs weren’t so sensitive about being gay.
Legislator Stiffs Prostitute
Instead of
Family Values Repub Legislator caught in Gay Blackmail Scandal
Finally, how dumb does one have to be to complain, COMPLAIN, to the cops about being blackmailed by someone after he was the one who stiffed the prostitute?
Most of northern Idaho would be in the Spokane media media market, too. Poor Idaho.
But the newsmedia will pay more attention to a negative video about Hillary by a former supporter. Also will pay more attention to any Democratic pork barrel than to massive Republican pork barrel spending. All these CNN expose-alls about pork barrel spending – where were they when the Republicans controlled both houses?
Jesus CHRIST! Is the Republican party a front for closeted gay men who pay for extramarital gay sex? Or straight men like Vitter who pay for extramarital straight (is a diaper fetish straight?) sex?
At least Curtis doesn’t appear to have been on the family values train, so that hypocrisy charge probably won’t be made against him; he seems to have focused on education and health care in his state.
It’s too bad that the family values party is forcing politicians to live double sexual lives by their anti-gay position. If there’s any positive slant to all this, maybe it’s that all of America will learn that “unstraight” sex is peppered throughout our culture, but its denial leads to scandal, disgrace, and family betrayal.
Too bad. I feel bad for Curtis’s family if they didn’t know.
Why should we care so much about a story about a State Rep? Is this national news? What’s next, sniffing around the news to see what our local mayors are up to?
JRS Jr, I think doth protest too loudly. What’s up? Where you in an adjoining booth looking through the glory hole?
Does national news not include the states? By this standard, state supreme court decisions and the fires in California should not be on the national news.
Perhaps all these GOPers deny being gay because they don’t understand that term. I mean, it sounds so happy. Ask them if they are homos and see if you get a straight answer. (Yes, that pun was intentional).
Uh, JRS, the mayor of neighboring Spokane was outed as a gay preditor of under-age boys a couple of years ago and was forced to leave office. He died soon after. So, yes, the GOP is rotten to the core, even on the local level.
Actually, Susie Bright pretty much said all there is to say:
http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2007/08/this-has-gone-1.html
Republican “Family Values” Politicians: They Talk the Talk…and really, isn’t that enough?
JRStroll asks: Why should we care so much about a story about a State Rep? Is this national news?
Since national news is all too often about how the Republicans use the right wing hatred of gay people as a political wedge issue, the irony of an anti-gay party that’s chock full of gay men is probably only lost on the average Republican, but believe me the average American gets it.
Imagine if a Democratic politician was found to be a member of the KKK. I know irony is a hard concept, but do try.
HA! I was sniffing around and found out that one of the local mayors has a lot of skeletons in his closet.
JRS Jr., don’t you sometimes wish that you hadn’t hit the submit comment button?
Racer with the “Nah nah nah nah nah, you are a troll!”
“Imagine if a Democratic politician was found to be a member of the KKK. I know irony is a hard concept, but do try.”
Isn’t there a long standing Democratic US Senator that was a member of the KKK?
My point being, isn’t there more important news than posts on a State (pretty small state for that matter) Representative???
If true, it’s just another example of a pervert hiding behind the Republican Party. The GOP needs to root out all these queers and clean itself up.
Something tells me that serial harasser Bill-O and closet queen Sean will totally ignore this story.
At first, all the various closeted, perverted, and sex-criminal Republicans seemed to just note that they’re hypocrites.
By now, however, this is just getting scary. If this is the party that was in charge, the party that is the party of our current Executive branch, then Kucinich should be questioning more than Bush’s mental health. Between this, the various insane statements by presidential candidates and talking heads, I’m wondering if the Republican Party isn’t some bastion of the mentally unstable.
Someone should do a book on all these cases.
From #6 by anney
“At least Curtis doesn’t appear to have been on the family values train, so that hypocrisy charge probably won’t be made against him; he seems to have focused on education and health care in his state.”
While Rep Curtis may not have been the mouthpiece for the rapture republicans, he voted against both the domestic partnership bill and the non-discrimination bill (both of which passed and were signed into law).
I’m just going to assume all my Republican friends are gay now. Maybe they can hook up with each other and stop living a lie with their wife and kids. The Gay Oold Party needs to come out of the closet!
Stop the hatin’ on Giuliani! Last I checked, he was FOR gay rights as mayor of NYC…
So. Is the issue ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘Republican’? Last I checked, there’s a Democratic KKK member in the U.S. senate. And not just a low-ranking member, a former imperial dragon..ROBERT BYRD.
So, might I ask: if I’m gay and out and a Republican, is that OK with you?
Just because I support tough on crime, the right to own a gun, protecting America and ‘what if gay babies were aborted’…
To me, what’s more disturbing is othewise-liberal newspaper columnists squirming about ‘Dumbledore is gay’. And add Obama to the list of Dems who, when push comes to shove, will throw gay rights under the bus to get the evangelical black vote in South Carolina.
By the way I met TWO gay Republicans in the past few months…but they’re still closeted. And one lives in Alabama. So I know the majority are still behind closed doors.
In reading other comments, I wonder how one person would know that he/she met two gay Republicans. Were they asked? Was there an encounter? Did the two merely have the ear piercing on the left? How was this perceived or discovered?
One fact cannot be ignored and that is that being gay is a pattern, as is being straight. Curtis’ escapade, as well as the Idaho senator’s, does not seem to be connected to any ostensible pattern, so saying that the two are gay is pushing envelope, just as it would be to say that a heretofore male homosexual is straight because he decides today he’s going to see what it’s like to have a romp with a woman. I state this as fact, not as defense or condemnation of anyone. But as far as making “gay Republicans” a new catch phrase, we don’t know even a fraction of what’s really going on, just two incidents which have come to light, of perhaps hundreds, which have not.
Are we really sufficiently naive to think every Democrat who happens to also be gay or “sexually exploratory” is out of the closet? For anyone with blinders on who thinks that, let’s wait and see what sex scandals come down the pike in the media in the next year or so. I think we’ll find them surprisingly non-partisan and proportionate.
Instead of “red state/blue state”, we’ll have to start referring to the division between blue states and pink states.
Why is this even news? By now it should be clear to everyone that deep inside of every Republican resides a homosexual who is just screaming to get out. It is no secret that Republicans have inner demons deep within their jingoistic conservative closets that are far worse then any of the things they try to acuse Democrats of. Basically…consider all the things that the Republican Party claims to be for and you will discover that the party is only good a producing politicians who are the total opposite of their ideology. One need not look any further then their daddy little hitler bush to realize that the Republican Party is not a party that is of, for or by the people.