Haggard Faces

Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out who’s been making the biggest media tour of self-promotion under the guise of justice and truth-telling – Ted Haggard or Rod Blagojevich?

Since Blago is a pompous windbag who was impeached and is really yesterday’s news, let’s go to the Colorado pastor who famously was evicted from his flock after revelations of gay affairs that he insist do not make him gay. See, isn’t that more fun?

In case you don’t own a television, Haggard has been on Oprah, Larry King, and other news outlets on the heels of an HBO documentary on his life directed by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter. The married evangelical is openly calling himself a liar and a hypocrite for anti-gay declarations and fighting gay marriage when it turns out he had sex with men.

In 2006, Haggard confessed to a money-for-sex relationship with former escort Mike Jones, from whom he also purchased crystal meth. Haggard was forced out of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the National Association of Evangelicals. Meanwhile, it was recently revealed that Haggard was sexually involved with former church member Grant Haas.

It’s interesting that Haggard’s self-flagellation doesn’t extend to his admitting that he’s anything near gay. Instead, he has gone one to say that he is “heterosexual with homosexual attachments” or “heterosexual with complications.” Coy? Oy!

Haggard reminds me of presumably straight men who sleep with men but don’t see themselves as gay. For them, dalliances with men are just sex and not any point of identity. The irony is that they almost totally define gay men by their sexuality.

Gay critics (deservedly) have scorched Haggard with fire-breathing criticisms. I despise his character too, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I feel sorry for him.

I don’t mean sorry as in I would give him a hug and say everything will be alright. I mean pity that he’s in deep denial and contorting his true nature to where his insides are more of a puzzle than his replies to interviewers’ questions. He’s creating his own Dante’s inferno without the Dante.

Even while Haggard praises his wife and makes pains to say he has a happy marriage and still wants his wife sexually, he still admits he’ s attracted to men – but he is no longer acting on it or trying not to, anyway. Perhaps the years in a religious environment that is virulently anti-gay, he morphed into a homophobic crusader even as the elephant in the room grew louder. Or maybe he thought any life without wife and kids seemed not normal and unspeakable.

However free he may sound, I know he in anguish. Those “feelings” won’t go away because they are a part of who he is. Haggard is just one soldier in an army of men who lead double lives and for whatever reason, can’t bring themselves to acknowledge and embrace gayness they have. For them, sexuality is never free because it’s bound by doubt and shame. He’s not overcoming anything so much as supplanting everything.

Some people are angry that the documentary seems to paint him in a sympathetic light. It does to a large degree. But it also gives us the picture of a man perpetually in conflict, trying in vain to convince people – maybe more so himself – that he’s not “really gay.”

So he can get a six-figure book deal, a talk show, and maybe a new church. But he doesn’t really win. As long as he tries to cocoon himself in a façade of heterosexuality, he will continue to break his own heart every day.