The NYT interview with GG

It's online. Thank Will Bunch at PNIOnline.com for the heads up.

It's practically not worth dissecting the same half-truths and deflections over and over and over again. But just in case a real journalist (other than Anderson Cooper, who rocked in his interview with GG) decides to do a REAL interview with GG, here a few questions to ask him next time. You can read the interview first, then come back for the analysis:

1. Why shouldn't your work as a prostitute be relevant to your being granted access to the president of the United States and possibly classified information during war time? You obviously had no problem using sex as part of your other profession, so why is it so outrageous for people to ask if you did the same in your current profession?

2. You have written a number of articles biased against gays, including one posted on your Web site just a few days ago. Your gay-subject articles are very often biased almost exclusively to the religious right point of view on gay issues - i.e., gays are bad (in one recent article on gay marriage you cited 6 anti-gay religious right sources and only one pro-gay source) - so why isn't your own gayness relevant when there's such a glaring hypocrisy between who you are as a gay man and the hatred of gays that you help others promote? And ironically, hatred that is promoted on behalf of people who loathe gay prostitutes even more than than they loathe gays.

3. You complain about the politics of personal destruction. You you had no problem trying to destroy a South Dakota reporter and newspaper with a series of stories that the executive editor of that newspaper said were often "either not true or manipulated to leave the impression that we were biased in favor of Daschle." And wasn't it Talon News, your employer, that helped promoted the fake story that John Kerry had an affair with an intern? (Yes, it was.) Did you cry out against Talon News when they indulged in the politics of personal destruction last year? And are you now repentant of indulging in your own politics of personal destruction against the South Dakota newspaper last year? Or is this just more evidence of your "do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy on every issue from gay rights, to prostitution, to the treatment of journalists and politicians?

4. You say you quit your job at Talon News to protect your mother who was being harassed. If that's the case, then why did Talon News remove all of your old articles off of their Web site? Isn't that a sign that Talon News had/has some kind of problem with you and your work, and possibly fired you? And, if you were concerned about the impact on your mother of all the publicity surrounding the growing scandal, then why, rather than dropping out of the public eye, did you immediately start granting more and more interviews to media outlets large and small, and even set up your own blog taunting your accusers? You are hardly trying to stay out of the public eye - in fact, you seem to be enjoying the publicity, and willingly provoking the very reaction from your critics that you claim you are trying to avoid in order to protect your family.

5. When asked about the rightwing's attacks on gays, you respond: "I am more interested in national defense, taxation and immigration than in personal issues." What you appear to mean is that you care more about national defense, taxation and immigration than gay issues, i.e., you aren't that concerned about the GOP's attacks on gays, their rights, their privacy, their families and their very existence. Fair enough. But your biggest complaint about the recent scandal is that YOUR private gay life is being attacked. I'm confused. Do you or don't you care about attacks on gay people and their private lives? Or do you only care, do you only speak out, do you only think it's wrong and outrageous when the gay being attacked is you?

You also say "I would like people's personal lives to be behind the barrier once again, like they used to be." How is holding down a job as a prostitute your
"personal life"? I assume you paid state and federal taxes on your prostitution income, since it was business income. How is business income your "personal life"?

And isn't it hypocritical of you to now be a champion of the "personal lives" of gays and prostitutes when you chose, and still choose, to work on behalf of a wing of the Republican party that has declared all out war on not only obscenity, but on people with the very "personal lives" you now wish others to defend (i.e., gays and prostitutes)?

6. You say that "We do have tremendous freedoms in this country, and one of the drawbacks of that is that people are free to take images of me and manipulate them however they want." How were any pictures of you manipulated? In fact, didn't people simply link to live images that were on live commercial Web sites that you knowingly and willingly published online with the intent of getting the largest audience possible in the hopes of making even more money? Isn't the real story here that rock solid proof has been unearthed that you worked for years as a gay male prostitute, had a "John" as late as 3 months before you were first seen covering the White House, and that your Web profiles continued to solicit for prostitution up until only a few weeks ago?

7. You also say "At some point in the future, everyone is going to have a picture on the Internet that they are unhappy about." How does that have anything to do with the main concern people have about you, namely, that you have been working as a male prostitute yet somehow managed to get around White House security (by getting the kind of regular ongoing access that only reporters with a 3 month FBI background check can get), get access to the president, and possibly access to classified information regarding the Valerie Plame affair? Are you suggesting that "everyone" in America will some day willingly post naked pictures of themselves online with the intent of running an illegal prostitution business while they get access to the president and classified information? That would seem unlikely.