Yet another far-right anti-gay legislator has been busted for trying to have sex with a man.
Emails shared with The Indianapolis Star suggest that state Rep. Phillip Hinkle — responding to a local posting on Craigslist — offered a young man $80 plus tip to spend time with him Saturday night at the JW Marriott hotel.
The emails, sent from Hinkle’s publicly listed personal address, ask the young man for “a couple hours of your time tonight” and offer him cash up front, with a tip of up to $50 or $60 “for a really good time.”
The email exchange is in response to the Craigslist posting in which the young man — who lists his age as 20 in the ad but says he is 18 years old — says, “I need a sugga daddy.”
The young man told The Star that they met, but that he tried to leave after the man told him he was a state lawmaker. He said the lawmaker at first told him he could not leave, grabbed him in the rear, exposed himself to the young man and then later gave him an iPad, BlackBerry cellphone and $100 cash to keep quiet.
When contacted by The Star about the emails, Hinkle, a Republican who represents portions of Pike and Wayne townships, did not contest the emails but said, “I am aware of a shakedown taking place.”
Asked what he meant by shakedown, Hinkle would not elaborate. He directed further questions to his attorney.
And yet again we have the classic case of blaming someone else for their problem and making the kid who placed the ad the bad guy. And again the whole thing is made to look like there’s something wrong with being gay.
No, what’s wrong here isn’t that Rep. Hinkle is homosexual. (He’s not gay any more than Larry Craig is.) It’s that he’s homosexual and repressed about it to the point that he goes out and does stupid stuff like pick up a kid on Craigslist. And through his repression, he’s made life miserable in Indiana for the LGBT community because of his own personal issues. And once again, as has happened hundreds of times in the past and will continue again and again, another family is devastated because of lying, denial, and repression. If Mr. Hinkle had been allowed by society and his culture to grow up as nature obviously intended him to — an open and self-confident person who was allowed to be himself rather than fit into some artificial template of rigid social norms — he, and a lot of other people, would be a lot better off.
The problem isn’t that Phillip Hinkle is homosexual. The problem is that he thinks being homosexual is a problem. But the solution isn’t found on Craigslist.
