Porn Free: The Rhetorical Role of Matt Sanchez

Conservative blogger Matt Sanchez offers us a fine example of rhetorical “role creation” in an essay he just penned for Salon.com.

You may have heard that Sanchez got his picture taken with Ann Coulter at the event at which she referred to John Edwards as a “faggot.” When the photo surfaced, some noted the irony in a gay man literally embracing Coulter given her comments (which was hardly the first time she’s made offensive remarks about homosexuality). When the fact that Sanchez once starred in gay pornographic movies emerged, the scrutiny intensified.

Two main purposes drive Sanchez’s Salon piece. The first is to address his past in the porn industry—a past that he had apparently tried to keep secret. The other is to address why he would apparently condone the use of hateful language directed at a community he’s part of. The implicit question he responds to is, “How can a gay man support someone who attacks your humanity in such a vulgar way?”

Sanchez does this by casting himself in the role of the Victim—not of Coulter, but of “liberals” who “outed my gay porn past.”

To do that, he has to do two seemingly contradictory things: argue that his pornographic past is no big deal (to admit there’s anything “wrong” with it would implicate himself in an act of immorality), but also argue that porn is immoral (to say otherwise would cancel his conservative credentials, if simply being gay didn’t already do that).

He wouldn’t have to negotiate that tricky tension if he made another rhetorical choice—say, that of casting himself in the role of the Repentant Sinner (a la Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, or even George W. Bush himself). But that approach doesn’t lend itself to placing responsibility on anyone else, and that’s what Sanchez wants to do.

So, we find Sanchez, in the space of a few paragraphs, both dismissing his porn career and condemning porn’s moral evils. On one hand, his stint in adult films happened “once upon a time” in the “ancient” past. It was a “long-ago summer job.” Porn itself is “self-explanatory and without depth.” It’s not something that he feels the need to disavow:

“It's just a part of my past, and as anyone who reflects on the past realizes,
it contributes to who I am today. No apologies, just recognition. No running
away, just moving forward.”

So Sanchez exonerates himself from any wrong-doing in the past. Yet, as a conservative, it’s not a rhetorical option to leave it at that. Sanchez cleanses himself rhetorically by scapegoating the porn industry itself for its moral lapses, or, as he calls it, “porn’s liberalism,” in which “everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is magnified.” It’s a “cult” in which he lost his belief (note again the lack of personal agency the metaphor implies). It’s this liberal mentality that ensnared him and kept him “anesthetized.”

But Sanchez accuses liberalism of more than simply sharing the same moral outlook as the porn industry. It’s guilty of hypocrisy. After all, he reasons:

Those on the left who now attack me would be defending me if I had espoused
liberal causes and spoken out against the Iraq war before I was outed as a
pseudo celebrity. They'd be talking about publishing my memoir and putting me on
a diversity ticket with Barack Obama. Instead, those who complain about
wire-tapping reserve the right to pry into my private life and my past for
political brownie points.

Of course, if he had espoused liberal causes, he likely wouldn’t have embraced someone who used the word “faggot” as a punchline. He elides the fact that the “attacks” result not from his past in pornography but from the apparent hypocrisy of a (professionally) gay man not only siding with a political camp that openly reviles homosexuality, but with a particularly ugly exemplar of its hateful excesses.

One can also take issue with his equation of himself to a victim of warrantless wiretaps. It’s one thing to have the government eavesdrop on your private phone calls without reason, quite another have regular citizens point out that they’ve seen you have mass-mediated sex for money. One’s “private life” isn’t exactly private if its on sale at the local adult bookstore.

But this isn’t simply a momentary lapse in analogical reasoning. I argue that it’s central to the rhetorical role Sanchez creates. He is the victim of liberals, a group that not only is in league with the porn industry (although, remember, there’s nothing wrong with *being* in pornography), but then hypocritically attacks and “outs” someone they would defend, if only he weren’t a Coulter fan.

As for Coulter, Sanchez says, “I don't agree with what she said, but anyone in the military would defend her right to say it.” Yet, if what Sanchez thought was so morally bankrupt about the porn industry is its penchant for trivializing the taboo (to use his own words), what is one to make of Coulter’s jocular use of “faggot?” One could argue Coulter’s entire career is based on trivializing the taboo by saying incredibly hateful and hurtful things, then writing them off as “jokes.” For that matter, Sanchez himself does this by making light of such remarks as so much weightless, meaningless babble:

We all have a tendency to want to hate the enemy. I suppose that's why Coulter
gets applause when she uses terms like "faggot" or "ragheads" (was that the last
Coulter scandal, or was it her comments about 9/11 widows?).

Perhaps most telling, however, is Sanchez’s admission that, “I am embarrassed to admit that was I worried that my fellow conservatives would distance themselves from me when the news about my film career broke.” He claims the opposite has, in fact, happened.

Whether that’s true or not is less interesting than the fact that Sanchez assumed that he would be distanced by conservatives. Perhaps it’s because conservatives have made political hay attacking gay marriage. Maybe it’s because they’ve attacked civil rights for gays and lesbians. Maybe it’s because they’ve tended to oppose hate crimes legislation. Maybe it’s because so many conservatives (including Ann Coulter) publicly say that homosexuality is degenerate.

And maybe it’s because the conservatives in Coulter’s audience laughed at her “joke.”

The fact that Sanchez worried about how his past would affect his relationship with conservatives suggests that perhaps his victim status is more than a rhetorical construct. As a gay man, he, along with gays and lesbians across the country, is victimized by so many on the Right on a regular basis.

And the anger and frustration aimed at Sanchez is not an attack on his conservatism itself, but on the fact that he seems so willing to aid and abet his own victimage.



Some questions to ponder and talk about via comments, if you like (along with anything else you might want to say):

For gay/lesbian Republicans (and those who love them): what about conservatism as an ideology speaks to you deeply enough that anti-gay aspects of the party platform can be overlooked? Is the “anti-gay” aspect of conservatism overplayed? Is the G.O.P. more open in practice than in its campaign rhetoric?

Why do you suppose Sanchez wrote this piece for Salon? Why do you suppose Salon published it?

Are there any other rhetorical options available for someone in Sanchez’s position? What else could he have said?

What other aspects of Sanchez’s article intrigue, bemuse, infuriate, entertain, surprise, or confuse you?