Kevin Spacey and a Whisper Network

After Kevin Spacey, Gay Men Need a Whisper Network, Too

By Jesse Dorris

November 8, 2017

In the wake of the sexual-assault allegations against Kevin Spacey, gay men should follow the lead of the women who have spoken out about powerful men like Harvey Weinstein.

Photograph by Steeve Iuncker / Agence VU / Redux

Because we are human beings, gay men talk to one another. Many of us have more or less known about Kevin Spacey for years—not just that he’s gay but that he’s not the kind of man you’d want your friend to go home with. Especially if he’s young. Jia Tolentino elegantly explained how women use the whisper network to warn one another about dangerous men; for a gay equivalent, I’d love to have the nerve to call it a lisping network, but I wonder if a better term might be the network that dare not speak its name.

Names are now being spoken, though. On October 29th, the out gay actor Anthony Rapp told BuzzFeed that Kevin Spacey sexually assaulted him when he was just fourteen. Rapp had made intimations about the attack before, but this time he put the name in lights. (Spacey stated that he did not recall the incident, but said, “If I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.”) Others have also come forward, including a gay artist who told Vulture that at age fourteen he began a sexual relationship with Spacey that ended about a year later, when, he alleges, Spacey tried to rape him. (Spacey, through his lawyer, denied the allegations to Vulture.) Harry Dreyfuss, the straight son of the actor Richard Dreyfuss, alleged that Spacey assaulted him when he was eighteen—while running lines with Dreyfuss’s famous father. (Spacey, through his lawyer, also denied Dreyfuss’s allegations.) Rapp said that seeing women come forward to talk about the predations of Harvey Weinstein helped inspire him to tell his own tale; in turn, the Vulture source and Dreyfuss were emboldened by seeing Rapp take the first step in talking about Spacey.

It’s a peculiar sign of progress that (cis, white) gay men are finally, actually powerful enough to be dangerous. For most of recorded history, any danger we may have posed was existential or illusory. On the other hand, religious institutions and educational institutions and media and Democrats and Republicans and parents and grandparents have long called us wicked. They’ve told us that we deserve to die of AIDS. That we are mentally deranged or spiritually possessed. That we must stay invisible in order to work, to rent a home, to buy a cake. Some believe that all gay men are rapists. Or that there’s no difference between a homosexual and a pedophile. Deliberately or not, Spacey himself conflated the two in his response to Rapp’s story, stating, “I choose now to live as a gay man.”

If that’s bravery, we don’t need another hero. But we do need to talk about predators in our midst.

Three things happen when a man is sexually threatened by another man: the sexuality of both men is put into question; the masculinity of both men is challenged; and the entire event fuels that old, hateful fantasy of gay men as rapists. We see this play out in the courageous accounts put forth by the men whom Spacey allegedly attacked. Rapp said that he didn’t tell his mother about the assault at the time because he wasn’t ready to come out to her; he later talked about the incident without naming Spacey, because he—and the media—respected the Oscar winner’s status in the closet. A journalist spoke anonymously to BuzzFeed about Spacey groping and then bullying him: “If I were to publish a story about Kevin Spacey sexually harassing me on the job . . . there’s no way without making it quite clear that he likes guys.” According to the same BuzzFeed piece, in 1995—the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—one of Spacey’s assistants allegedly approached a military adviser on the set of the movie “Outbreak” to arrange an assignation. “You didn’t want anybody knowing or even smelling the fact that you might be gay or that there was any kind of interaction with him”—Spacey—“on any kind of level,” the adviser said.

Attention can be dangerous. When a straight guy is harassed, he might think, You’ve got the wrong guy, I’m not into this. He might feel angered or ashamed, and those feelings might complicate his ability to report the crime. But when a gay or bi man is sexually threatened—particularly one who is trapped in the closet and justifiably terrified of being found out—a part of him might think, How did you know?

When men talk about being raped or assaulted, they essentially have to talk about whether they like sex with men. The answer can cost a man his family, his job, or worse. Women are maligned for asking for it, but men are suspected of desiring it. It’s the difference between being a tease and being depraved. For some gay men, this libel is especially cruel because sexual violence often includes—and relies on—sexual pleasure. In his fascinating interview with Vulture, the gay artist who at fourteen and fifteen had sex with Spacey said, “What he left me with, more than what he took from me, was a sense that I deserved this. And that’s the knot I’m still untangling. Every time I’ve ever told the story, I am compelled to tell people how seductive I was. . . . So if you’re little and somebody touches your penis, it’s terrifying and shameful. At the same time, neurologically, it’s pleasurable.” As a queer man who was raped at thirteen, I know that knot. The world around me said that it wasn’t my fault that I was raped, but also that my desire for men was hazardous. If I had been eighteen, or twenty-five, or thirty at the time, the following still would be true: if you feel any pleasure at all from the hand of a man, you are sick and a sinner. Consenting to it is even worse.

Men talking about sexual assault are also talking about manhood. A real man should be able to fight off an attacker. “I am strong enough, thank God, both somewhere in my brain and in my body, to get him off of me,” the gay artist recalled. “I’m sturdy, thankfully.” It takes guts to marshal one’s physical assets to stave off violence, and it should be applauded. But not everyone can. The journalist whom Spacey allegedly assaulted first wondered if, as he put it, “I should just, like, knock his teeth out, or something. I was in a weird dynamic of I wanted to be able to do my story.” Spacey resorted to the macho tactic of calling his mark a chicken. Spacey was “screaming at me with fury because I didn’t want to fuck him,” the journalist said. “He was actually saying that I did want to and I was a coward.” In this scene, a closeted actor accuses a man of lacking the courage to have sex with him. The mind reels.

It’s Rapp’s account that, perhaps unintentionally, strikes at the heart of how difficult it is for gay men to talk about assault. He told BuzzFeed that Spacey picked him up “like a groom picks up the bride over the threshold,” then pinned him on a bed. Rapp deserves a lifetime of flowers for coming forward so candidly. “He was trying to seduce me,” he said. “I don’t know if I would have used that language.” It’s disquieting to watch Rapp conceptualize Spacey’s attack on a fourteen-year-old through the rhetoric of heterosexual ritual. But underneath it is the idea that if two people have sex, one must be the woman. We call the receptive partner passive, as if he should be resisting. We call him the bottom, regardless of how limbs intertwine, as if he can’t sink any lower. At the root of so much bigotry against gay men is the presumptive pain of taking it like a woman. Of being like a woman. And what could be worse than that?

No victims are obligated to tell their story. Perhaps gay men shy away from unmasking the predators and pedophiles around them because we, in part, fear proving the homophobes right. And perhaps it might be even tougher to out the rapists. Comics and politicians alike gleefully threaten that rapists will, once in jail, be raped themselves. It’s wildly perverse to expect gay men to snitch—however despicable their fellow gay men are—when the punishment will be the crime. Both gay men and women have thousands of reasons to distrust the police.

Gay men like women, because they are human beings. And gay men’s great historical coping strategy has been looking to women. Honoring and modelling (and, yes, mocking and belittling, perhaps as a way of not identifying with them too much) the way women triumph over pain. The way women triumph over men. And they’re doing it again, coming forward with allegations about many different men in power who aren’t Harvey Weinstein. We should follow their lead. We should build our own network of whispers and lisps, of receipts and proof. It’s happening already. It’s a strategy that has kept gays alive for as long as we’ve been here. We’re not going anywhere. So, can we talk?

Jesse Dorris is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

Many ESC fans from all over the world are so very sad because we lost Joy Fleming - one of the best singers ever. 


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