The Men’s Room

Margaret leaves the office. 

Leo and Hoynes sit in opposite ends.

LEO

How was New York?

HOYNES

Standard and Poor's going to raise the city's credit rating.

LEO

Good.

HOYNES

Nice of you to call me over. We don't see enough of each other.

LEO

No.

HOYNES

Margaret's looking good.

LEO

Did you blow off C.J. Cregg this morning?

HOYNES

Leo...

LEO

I'm asking...

HOYNES

Is that what this is about?

LEO

Did you?

HOYNES

You know what, C.J. doesn't need to come running to you every time she hits a bump...

LEO

C.J. did not come running, John, she covered your ass, she's a good girl. 

And when she tells you something, I want you to consider it a directive from this office.

HOYNES

You want me to consider it a directive from THIS office?

LEO

Yes.

HOYNES

Well, let me consult Article Two of the Constitution, cause I'm not a hundred percent sure where THIS Office gets the authority to direct ME to The Men’s Room!

LEO

You really want to do this now?

HOYNES

Leo, I have had it up to here, with you and your pal! I've been shoved into a broom...

LEO

[gets riled] 

Excuse me! ME and my PAL...?

HOYNES

Yes.

LEO

You are referring to President Bartlet?

HOYNES

Yes.

LEO

Refer to him that way.

HOYNES

[gets up] 

Goodnight, Leo.

LEO

Don't do what you're doing, John.

HOYNES

You're a World Class political operative, Leo. 

Why the hell shouldn't I keep doing what I've been doing?

LEO

'Cause I'll win, and you'll end up playing celebrity golf for the rest of

your life.

HOYNES

How long do you expect me to stick around here and be his whipping boy?

LEO

Give This President anything less than your full-throated support, and you're going to find out exactly how long.

HOYNES

Goodnight, Leo.

LEO

Goodnight, John.

Hoynes leaves. Leo picks up the paperwork from the table and continues to read.

“The date of 21 July 2016 should have been a great moment for supporters of gay rights in the United States. That day Peter Thiel took to the stage of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and addressed the main hall. A gay man had appeared on a Republican platform before, but not alone and not openly identifying as such. 

By contrast the co-founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook, made a clear and head-on reference to his sexuality as he endorsed Donald Trump as the candidate of the Republican Party for President. During his speech Thiel said, ‘I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.’ 

All of this was received with huge cheers in the hall. Such a situation would have been unimaginable even a few election cycles before. NBC was among the mainstream media to report all of this in a positive light. ‘Peter Thiel makes history at RNC’ ran the headline. 

The gay press was not so positive. 

America’s foremost gay magazine, Advocate, attacked Thiel in a long and curious piece consisting of an excommunication from the Church  of Gay. The title read: 

‘Peter Thiel Shows Us There’s a Difference between Gay Sex and Gay.’ 

The sub-banner on the 1,300-word piece by Jim Downs (an associate professor of history at Connecticut College) asked 

‘When you abandon numerous aspects of queer identity, are you still LGBT?’ 

While Downs conceded that Thiel is ‘a man who has sex with other men’, he questioned whether he was in any other way actually ‘gay’.‘

‘That question might seem narrow,’ the author admitted. ‘But it is [sic] actually raises a broad and crucial distinction we must make in our notions of sexuality, identity, and community.’ 

After pooh-poohing those who had hailed Thiel’s speech as any kind of watershed moment – let alone ‘progress’– Downs pronounced his anathema: 

‘Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man. Because he does not embrace the struggle of people to embrace their distinctive identity.’ 

Exhibit A for this gay heresy-finder was that in his speech at the RNC Thiel had dismissed the endless high-profile rows about trans bathroom access, who should use which bathrooms and what facilities should be laid on where. 

Although Thiel had said that he didn’t agree with ‘every plank in our party’s platform’, he did state that ‘fake Culture Wars only distract us from our Economic Decline’. 

As he went on, ‘When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?’ 

This went down very well in Cleveland. And if opinion polls are anything to go by it is a statement that would go down very well across America. It is demonstrably the case that more people are worried about the economy than are worried about bathroom access. 

But for Advocate this was a deviation too far. 

While reaffirming his own ‘sexual choices’ Thiel was guilty of ‘separating himself from gay identity’. His opinions on the relative ephemerality to the wider culture of transgender bathrooms ‘effectively rejects the conception of LGBT as a cultural identity that requires political struggle to defend’. 

Thiel was alleged to be part of a movement which since the 1970s had not ‘invested in the creation of a cultural identity to the extent that their forebears did’. 

The success of gay liberation had apparently stopped them doing this ‘cultural work’. 

But this was DANGEROUS, as the recent massacre at a gay nightclub had shown in some unconnected way. 

The author left his readers with the powerful reminder that ‘The gay liberation movement has left us a powerful legacy, and protecting that legacy requires understanding the meaning of the term “gay” and not using it simply as a synonym for same-sex desire and intimacy.’

In fact the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016 had been carried out by a young Muslim who swore allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). 

Yet this detail didn’t detain Advocate or the Gay Pride march in New York later the same month. 

On that occasion the parade led with a huge rainbow banner emblazoned with the words ‘Republican Hate Kills!’, clearly forgetting that Omar Mateen had not been a member of the Republican Party. 

It isn’t just that the self-appointed organizers of the ‘gay community’ have a particular view of politics. 

They also have a specific view of the alleged responsibilities that being gay brings with it. In 2013 the novelist Bret Easton Ellis was reprimanded and banned from the annual media awards dinner by the gay organization GLAAD. 

He had been found guilty of tweeting views about the asinine nature of gay television characters that GLAAD said ‘the gay community had responded negatively to’.

This censorious tone–the prim schoolmaster tone–is the same one Pink News unleashed with a straight face in 2018, with its list of ten ‘dos and don’ts’ for straight people on ‘how they should behave in gay bars’.

In all of these cases the normal instinct is to say ‘Just who the hell do you think you are?’ 

But after his reprimand for wrong-think Ellis managed to sum up what had become a whole part of the new gay problem. 

This was, as he said, that we had come to live in ‘The Reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol.’ 

The reign of the magical gay elf has indeed been settled for the time being as one of the acceptable ways in which society has made its peace with homosexuality. 

Gays can now marry like everybody else can pretend that they have children in exactly the same way as everybody else, and in general prove – as Dustin Lance Black and Tom Daley do on their YouTube channel – that gays are unthreatening people who actually spend their lives being cute and making cupcakes. 

As Ellis wrote, ‘The Sweet and Sexually Unthreatening and Super-Successful Gay is supposed to be destined to transform The Hets into noble gay-loving protectors –as long as the gay in question isn’t messy or sexual or difficult.’

The former enfant terrible of American fiction had put his finger on something here.”