Word: affair
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...recently hit the state of Oregon. Sam Adams—the openly gay mayor of Portland who had been hailed as America’s “great gay hope”—was embroiled in scandal last month when he confessed to lying about an affair he’d had with an 18-year-old political intern named Beau Breedlove. Despite the fact that Adams denied the affair throughout the course of his mayoral campaign, Breedlove insists that he welcomed Adam’s advances and had never felt victimized?...
...most broadcast cause of public ire was the fact that Adams had lied about the relationship—not that he’d cultivated a homosexual liaison with a younger person. Yet the calls for Adams to resign and the media coverage of the issue have tinged the affair with a pallor of homophobia and judgment of Adams’s sexual behavior...
...Outside Portland’s City Hall, people waved placards and shouted “pedophile” in protest of his continued service. Major papers such as The Oregonian dubbed the affair a “sex scandal” and the relationship, “inappropriate.” Rare is coverage of the affair that doesn’t in some way construct the relationship as the older, experienced man taking advantage of a young boy, confused and overwhelmed by his own sexuality. Yet critics insist that their disgust at Adams’s behavior comes about...
...many ways, the Adams affair is a double disloyalty. Hidden behind the fervent insistence that the scandal isn’t about “gay predators or gay anything” (as Timothy Egan insisted in his blog for the New York Times) is the implicit acknowledgement that Adams’s “betrayal” was not just of his constituents’ trust, but also of the gay community at large. When Adams denied the relationship during his campaign, he smeared his accuser, insisting that the charges were indicative of the worst kind of homophobia...
...emerges clean from an affair such as this. Obviously, Adams is the clear loser in the situation. His first wrong—not fessing up when a reporter wrote a series of articles about his relationship with Breedlove—was compounded by his choice of defense against the allegations that were actually true. Adams brought his own sexuality into the picture by accusing reporters of homophobia during his 2007 campaign for mayor. Adams argued that the accusations played into “the worst deep-seated fears society has about gay men” in the Portland Mercury...