The House Is Not a Home

GOODMAN, WALTER

Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN The House Is Not a Home The continuing hoo-hah over the sex-in-Washington scandals has been a revelation to inspectors of the American psyche. To think that after all...

...And please don't worry about the Vice Squad...
...if you're on to a good thing, you don't keep it to yourself, you pass it around on a boat...
...They don't understand the way things work...
...In the name of logic, then, if we are willing to pay for a House gymnasium, why not for a House house...
...Liz, you come to New York...
...When sexual favors are given for free, then the relationship becomes sinister, a form of servitude...
...By their second meeting, it was clear to her that he didn't have the means and he didn't know the way...
...These bold young women have proved, if proof were necessary, that a girl does not need to know how to dial a telephone number or clean teeth to be a success in America...
...Now, do you think you can get one of your friends in Congress to get us $10 million for 30 days...
...It's an instantaneous zoning change...
...They deserve a trophy from the Sierra Club for getting back to fundamentals, and making Hays while the sun shines...
...Are we content to leave the satisfaction of normal human needs to those favor-seeking lobbyists who will be only too glad to satisfy them—for a price...
...I doff my bra to those sisters from Eighth Avenue to the strip in Vegas who are making prudent use of their natural resources...
...Let me assure you Liz, that in New York these days it is very difficult to get in trouble for anything as long as it's dirty enough...
...One of the sisters told me, pre-publication, of her relationship with a member of the Ways and Means Committee...
...Mayor Beame is a well-known little figure around bankruptcy court...
...Yet we cannot have our legislators trying to do their jobs in a state of heat...
...I trust that in the months ahead, those legislators who, with creditable modesty, have so far held back from celebrating their particular therapeutic arrangements will come forward as exemplars to their colleagues and give a boost to the homegrown products of the District of Columbia...
...Of course not...
...It grieved me to read about that luckless Congressman from Utah...
...Now, nobody is denying that rest and relaxation are as essential for Congressmen as for tensed-up executives in private industry...
...To think that after all this nation has endured in its 200 years, we are still able to get upset at the news that a Congressman has billed the citizenry for his private pleasures...
...If some wise-alec kid gets fresh, you can purchase nuisance insurance from a nearby cop...
...At this very hour, from the loins of these lusty women are emerging a wealth of books and films which, I dare to predict, will take their place in the annals of Liberation, alongside The Return of the Happy Hooker...
...He could easily run down a mugger, and find himself in a nasty civil rights case...
...Does anybody doubt that Richard Nixon would have ended up a happier President if he had had somebody cuter to fool around with than Ehrlichman and Haldeman...
...We must all get out of the love bag...
...The path has not been easy...
...However, the aura of righteousness that has spread over the capital like a miasma off the Potomac has obscured certain contrary opinions about the alleged hanky-panky...
...There are exponents of all religions there, including Mormons, and they all have their minds on the same thing...
...But she persevered, and was soon earning $28,000 a year...
...We don't want them going on moonlight picnics in Central Park...
...I have not been so exhilarated by a public event since Indira Gandhi became the mother of her country...
...The indignation, especially among legislators, demonstrates that despite what so many of us have believed for ever so long, there are many living Congressmen who have never paid for their sexual divertissements, who have never taken young females along on trips at the public's expense or otherwise tippled at the Treasury's trough, and have never made deals with Wayne Hays...
...The pressures of the post must be dealt with...
...So, Liz, we encourage all the city tradeswomen—a major asset which by Comptroller Harrison Goldin's rough count now amounts to about 100,000 bodies or well over 10 million pounds on the hoof—to get into their platform shoes and their hot pants and circulate around Madison Square Garden...
...We don't want them taking the subway...
...Have you ever seen the way a Congressman drives when he's out in search of a piece...
...Ralph Nader, who has never been caught doing anything enjoyable, would not permit it...
...They have upgraded governmental efficiency and assured their own tranquility, which is so important to all the rest of us...
...Well, Liz, we don't want these people to get into trouble...
...Nobody has to go to Baltimore ever again...
...A tight-assed town like that, where to borrow a million dollars could cost a person a coronary...
...We certainly don't want our Congressmen roaming the streets of Washington at night in search of gratification...
...That sort of tension can lead to a preemptive nuclear strike...
...It's as ecumenical as a running politician...
...Did the man really travel all the way to Salt Lake City to get laid and then pick on a cop...
...A man can take a walk to buy a newspaper without risk of being aroused, and if somebody whistles at his wife, he knows it's appreciation, not business...
...We happy happy hookers, we band of sisters...
...Let me explain how these matters are handled in New York...
...Ida Breck, activist, sex therapist and lay counselor, and author of The Wholesome Whore...
...A Cultural Explosion And now Ms...
...Refusing to be cast in roles custom-made for them by American male capitalism and using only what God in Her wisdom has custom-made for them, they have shown us all that women can hack it...
...Many of our clients, after all, are along in years...
...Breck's record of convictions has filled several of her books...
...Prell has never been caught in the reflecting pool with his trousers on or in the secretary pool with them off, "Personally, and in behalf of the U.S...
...Where's the sense to it...
...Friends, there is nothing wrong with the girls of Washington...
...Meantime, around the Garden, all those family men from Sioux Falls and all those hookers from God knows where will find one another and will disappear into hotel rooms...
...It's just a question of bringing out the best in them and turning on the best of them...
...The Garden, you know, is where the circus is held, so the local residents are accustomed to peculiar sights in midday and will not bat an eye...
...Moreover, they have shown a fine collegial thrust...
...They all intend to do what people are supposed to do at a convention...
...House of Representatives and its associated bodies, some of whom can be found any evening on the streets near the capital city's major hotels, I wish to commend the men and women who have come together to show that you can get what you need right here in Washington, and don't have to go for it to Baltimore...
...Hope for Our Cities And finally, Mayor Abraham Beame of New York City...
...All praise to their parents for not insisting that they learn to type or wear underpants...
...Can it be true...
...For Congressmen to have to leave the capital to get their rocks off is a waste of time and energy as well as a drain on their attention span—not to mention that if, like dummies, they go to their home towns, it can really screw up family relations...
...We'll make it worth your while, kid...
...Liz Ray, what's a girl like you doing in a place like Washington...
...We don't want them to begin dropping paper bags out of their hotel windows and molesting bellhops...
...What we do is, we throw a convention at Madison Square Garden...
...And that, Liz, is the way our town welcomes its visitors, encourages domestic commerce, keeps the peace, and cleans up the streets...
...But we understand that since there is nothing of any interest going on at their convention, they are bound to get restless...
...They have exposed one more male canard—that it is necessary to be able to write in order to produce a book...
...Well, when this happens, a hundred other neighborhoods in Manhattan will all at once be free of sex...
...As I have been explaining to consciousness-raising groups through the length and breadth of the land, and especially on the upper West Side of New York, sex between men and women is a dubious business at best...
...The solution is before us, and we must admire those men, many of them still wrapped in anonymity, who have taken sex off the streets and brought it into their offices...
...We hear first from Congressman Digby Prell, chairman of the House Committee on Affairs...
...It's cheaper than analysis and demonstrably more effective...
...The occasion stands as the final rebuke to those who have been circulating the slander that Congress is made up mainly of very ordinary people who are as greedy and shifty and lecherous as the next guy...
...The place is packed with politicians from all over, from towns you wouldn't believe, like Butte, Montana...
...Vice is not without its defenders in this land, and once again it is left to The New Leader to fill the breeches, oops breach, and give minority voices an airing...
...There's still a square foot or so of space left near the Americana Hotel that you can patrol, and nobody will bother you...

Vol. 59 • July 1976 • No. 15


 
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