Freshman Illinois GOP Congressman Aaron Schock, who seems to be enjoying all the attention he's getting for his "abs of steel," and otherwise pretty appearance, recently did an interview with DETAILS magazine, in which he apparently divulged, again, that in spite of ongoing speculation to the contrary, he is not gay.
Perhaps. But if Schrock isn't gay, he needs to learn a few things about how not to be gay.
1. Don't obsess about your body and your abs (you do). It's kinda gay.
2. Don't do interviews with Details magazine (you did). We love them, but then again, we're kind of gay.
3. Don't go to dinner at gay diners where you're the only "straight" guy in the place. You did, and people noticed.
4. Don't make excuses for why you're 27, gorgeous, smart, successful, powerful, and just can't seem to find the right girl (you did, you are, and you can't). We've heard them all before, they're cliché as hell, and they just convince people even more that something isn't quite right.
Now, why should anyone care if you were gay? Because you represent the conservative wing of a political party that has made homophobia one of its two core pillars (the other being opposition to abortion). It would be the height of hypocrisy were you to spend your days in bed with the enemy, and your nights in bed with your community. Gay-supportive and closeted is one thing (in my book). Anti-gay and closeted, and supporting the most anti-gay elements of your own party, is quite another.
And if anyone thinks this post is mean, you should read what I'm not writing about. It's a small town, Aaron. People talk.
I'll leave you with this paragraph from the Details interview. Every gay man in America will recognize Schock's excuse for why he's still single. It doesn't mean he's gay. But boy does it set off alarm bells.
Schock is hoping his romantic prospects will improve too, once he settles in. He's the only one of his siblings not married with children, and is similarly an outlier among his friends. "I had a group of five or six guys, and we hung out and traveled—ski trips and stuff," he says. "They slowly got picked off—married, married, married." His pals try not to dog him about his love life. "I think he's got enough pressure as it is," says Shea Ledford, a concrete worker who's been Schock's good friend since high school. Indeed, there's been enough speculation about Schock's confirmed-bachelor status that, as far back as 2004, a Chicago newspaper asked him whether he was gay (his response: "No . . . I'm not."). But D.C. receptions and fund-raisers where the other attendees are, as Schock notes, "two and three times my age" hardly make for a ripe pickup scene. Neither do the baby-kissing events back in Illinois. "There's no line of young ladies at my door every morning," he says. "Maybe when they read my Details profile . . . "Yeah, maybe.
