Ain’t nobody’s business if you do.

So said the 1957 Wolfenden Report, stunning for its time, which said homosexuality should not be a crime in Britain. Gays and straights are celebrating its 50th anniversary this very week, and justly, joy is unconfined.

As it turned out, Britain waited 10 years to change the law. Canada waited an extra two before killing the law that ladled out 14-year prison sentences to captured homosexuals. We’re a cautious country. The fact that we were one of the first nations to allow gay marriage is “The Top, the Col-i-se-um, the Louvre Mu-seum,” and every other lyric in Cole Porter’s famous song, You’re the top.

And then there’s Idaho, The Gem State, home to Senator Larry Craig. The State vegetable is the potato, the state fruit is huckleberry and the State dance is square.

When it comes to homophobia in the United States, Idaho is the flaming cross on the lawn. The Aryan Nations had their headquarters there (they’ve since moved to Alabama). Idaho law still regards sodomy as a “crime against nature” and a possible penalty of life in prison still stands, despite a relevant U.S. Supreme Court ruling that seems to disagree.

It is in this context that we watch the Craig case unfold. Craig, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour after being arrested for his shoe-nudging and hand-flapping signals to the hot cop in the next stall, thinks he can get away with it. “It” doesn’t refer to toilet sex. “It” means gayness.

Given that in Idaho, gayness means something like death by mob, Craig’s terror is cowardly but understandable. This is why he said, “I am not gay. I have never been gay.” As though gay is the worst thing anyone could be. In Idaho, it is.

Craig has spent his career vilifying homosexuals. I wonder why.

An embarrassing 1996 study (thanks, Toronto Star) suggests there may be a reason for this. The study, which measured men’s sexual arousal, showed that homophobic males were aroused by explicit homosexual images, while non-homophobic men were not. Which suggests that men who are unhappy with their own homosexual urges go into a full-throttle flaps-down denial by persecuting men who are like them.

And here we move into a moral link that I may or may not be able to sustain. It’s up to you.

It’s in all of us

Last night I lay sleepless, having at midnight finished reading a book by Katrin Himmler. It’s the kind of book where you remove the dustcover because Nazi photos stare at you when you put it down.

Katrin is Heinrich Himmler’s great-niece. She reveals in the biography of her family that the book is not about Heinrich, but rather about his toady brothers—that they all lived on lies. Heinrich was misunderstood and his brothers were nice as pie, they claimed.

As Katrin discovered, Himmler’s brothers were full-bore Nazis and her parents decided to evade this knowledge. As well, they were creepy, petulant, curtain-twitcher, meticulous Nazis, meaning that they betrayed friends and colleagues in a world where a poor workplace evaluation could mean gassing. It wasn’t the furniture made out of Jewish bones, it was the moral nicks and cuts—those smaller revelations—that made Katrin sick for months as she researched the book.

What kept me awake into the awful hours of the early morning was that the power-worshipping, backstabbing day-at-the-office world of the Himmler brothers is a world I recognize. We all have this in us, in a small pocket in our heart, or maybe it’s a bile duct. We have secrets, we know other people’s secrets, we have power, we abuse power, we are ratty rather than noble.

Bully arousal

Craig torments gays because he is terrified of being found gay, just as he is sexually aroused by the increased danger of that discovery. That’s why he prowls men’s rooms. I’ve been in the St. Paul-Minneapolis Airport’s mall, where Craig was arrested. It has awful big box tat. It’s hard to imagine such a soul-destroying place being erotic, but it’s the mundanity that makes it prickly and hot for Craig.

It is actually arousing for Craig to decry legislation that would define attacks on gays as a hate crime and to call Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky years a “nasty bad naughty boy.” It puts a flush on one’s cheeks.

All bullies have this in common; Karl Rove who snitched on Valerie Plame, Ernst and Gerhard Himmler who preened and strutted because their brother was at the top, Alberto Gonzalez, who never found a Texas execution of a mentally handicapped man that he couldn’t recommend to then-governor George W. Bush, and the lovely Larry Craig.

It’s ironic watching the Republican Party squirm as Craig threatens to stick around during the election campaign.

All’s wellâe¦

We shall cheer up now.

Katrin Himmler has since married her boyfriend Dani, a Jew whose grandparents managed to survive the Second World War in Poland with the help of Aryans. They have a little boy. Like any other couple, they have he says/she says fights. They visit Germany and he mutters that some pompous official is a “bloody Nazi” and she says he should be less sweeping in his judgments and he says, “The main thing for you is always to behave—properly!” and she collapses because her great-uncle once praised his men for their “proper” way of extermination and he apologizes âe¦

And as for Craig, the lyrics to Cole Porter’s lyrics have been amended online: “—You’re a boom/You’re the dam at Boulder, You’re the moon/Over Mae West’s shoulder/I’m the nominee of the G.O.P./Or GOP!/ But if baby I’m the bottom/You’re the top!”

This Week

I read Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, by the Australian writer Danielle Wood. It’s a collection of grim fairy tales, not about little girls but about women and the wolves they encounter in the deep dark woods. These days, the wolves are brutal husbands, tyrannical female copy editors in newsrooms, pervert uncles and that stupid unwearable meringue of a wedding dress. The stories are odd and witty, but have an undercurrent of pure terror. Young women will love this book, but after reading it, they may not want to go outside.