What the cat dragged in

Canberra man founds world’s lamest gay sex ring

If success has many fathers (while failure is an orphan), spawning a “gay sex ring” seems to be a shotgun marriage where any convenient groom/father/founder will do – and all the better for such a lifelong lock-in should the metaphorical bride’s pregnancy turn out to be mere abdominal bloating.  

Daniel McDonald, one of the two ADFA “Skype cadets”, has been found guilty of some pretty nasty acts, which I don’t want to defend in any way.  However, some salacious pre-sentence reporting around a June 2013 incident in a Canberra nightclub, one that almost dare not speaketh its details – and at which Daniel McDonald wasn’t even present – seems misguided, to put it mildly.

The headlines about the Canberra nightclub incident refer to male-to-male sex acts, which, if such acts occurred in a (presumably) public place, are indeed newsworthy.  Occurring in a public place, they are criminal, even if fully consensual (of which more about soon).  The first hole in this story is thus that, rather surprisingly you may think, no criminal charges have arisen from this incident.  My best guess for the reason here is that the reported “sexual acts” are at the lowest, ambiguous end of the scale.  The only reported details here that I am aware of are:

“The bastardisation allegations include claims that cadets were forced to fondle each other's genitals and drink urine, according to previous media reports”.

Umm, I would have thought that the dirtiest word here was “forced” – and that if the above acts were in fact consensual, to label them “sexual” seems a bit of a stretch, in my opinion.   The lack of any subsequent criminal charges strongly suggests that the participants were not “forced”, so all we are left with is some pretty standard straight boys’-night-out sort of stuff.  Oh, except for the possibly pregnant insinuation that other, much gayer/sexier, stuff may have happened, by virtue of the word “includes” in the above quote, and also the widely reported allusion that the Canberra nightclub incident was just the public exposure of a nine-month long rampant sex ring, one with an obviously ironic (I would have thought) name, “Love of My Life”.

Oh please.  If Daniel McDonald was the 'founder' of a footy (rugby) gay sex ring – as the Australian’s headline breathlessly put it yesterday – he has failed abjectly as a sexual entrepreneur.  His product is mundane – the least-actually-gay “gay” activities I have ever heard described as such – and he wasn’t even present at the supposed crowning debauchery, the Canberra nightclub incident in June.

I don’t see a “sex ring” at all, in fact – rather, I detect a rather more vicious, and obscene, ring of managerial blame-shifting.  There is clearly something wrong with the culture at ADFA.  But dressing-up a rather ordinary para-sexual incident as “disgust[ing]”, and lauding the “moral courage” of the ADFA students who dobbed-in the supposed gay sex ring as “demonstrating a good culture that’s developed in ADFA at the moment” is a plain and simple witch-hunt – a desperate act of/by a sick culture, rather than something that is going to fix it.