Alex Ross has a long and fascinating essay in the New Yorker on gay equality and culture change writ large, and I thought this section of the piece, about how camp culture has become something that everyone wants access to, rather than a refuge for people who were excluded from other aspects of culture and civic life, was particularly important:

In the nineties, there was a vogue for the phrase “post-gay,” signifying life outside the ghetto, and in 2005 Andrew Sullivan announced the “end of gay culture.” Yet, like Sarah Bernhardt, camp always seems to be coming around for one more farewell tour. Chris Colfer, the fearlessly swishy young actor who has become the star of “Glee,” has revived the cult of Judy and Babs for the post-millennial generation. Curiously, Halperin doesn’t mention “Glee,” but he says that his gay students lap up all that antiquated lore, effortlessly unravelling its codes. He also notes that the gay audience tends to lose interest when coded messages give way to explicitly affirmative ones. Lady Gaga tried to write a new gay anthem with “Born This Way,” yet the song failed to ignite the clubs and bars as “Poker Face” had before it. Subtext is sexier.

In the straight world, meanwhile, the mortal fear of being mistaken for gay is weakening. Halperin could have added a chapter on the semiotics of “Call Me Maybe,” the pop ditty by Carly Rae Jepsen that became a monster hit this past summer, thanks in part to YouTube videos where everyone from Justin Bieber to Colin Powell was seen singing along. The official video gave the song a queer vibe from the outset: the singer sees a half-naked young man mowing the lawn, requests a possible telephone connection, and then discovers, to her dismay, that he prefers his own kind. (His “Call me” pantomime to another guy is more than a bit camp.) The most popular of the lip-synch videos features members of the Harvard baseball team, in all their macho splendor. Such gayish cavorting would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Likewise, you knew that the days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were numbered when soldiers stationed in war zones uploaded videos of themselves prancing suggestively to Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah” and other dance hits. At certain moments, straight people can seem gayer than the gays.

The interesting question here, and the one that other liberation movements could learn from, is how gayness and gay culture were successfully sold to mass audiences as aspirational and compelling, something that everyone wanted admission to, rather than a response to exclusion. Will and Grace may have started Joe Biden on his road to marriage equality, but it’s not as if it was one show, or one song that was the tipping point. And this isn’t a simple story of one half of a binary taking its place as desirable while the other half spent its time in darkness. It’s about how camp and heterosexuality learned to live together, how we learned to decouple cultural signifiers from our identities. That’s a major achievement, and one I’m not sure we’ve totally reckoned with yet.

The media spent a fair amount of Veteran’s Day weekend abuzz with gossip about a small handful of veterans, starting with CIA Director and retired four-star Gen. David Petraeus and his biographer turned paramour Paula Broadwell. Petraeus resigned from his position heading the CIA on Friday, citing an extramarital affair, and setting off a cascade of online digging, speculative reporting and Bond jokes on Twitter. You could see Broadwell on The Daily Show winning a push-up contest for charity and on Book TV, speculate about whether Broadwell’s husband wrote to New York Times Ethicist Chuck Klosterman for advice–turns out, he didn’t–and pun on her name, a laugh-line for every taste.

The tawdriness of the affair, and the contradictions it represented were simply too obvious to be ignored. Broadwell’s glowing review of Petraeus was titled All In: The Education of General Petraeus. She wrote ”General David Petraeus’s Rules for Living,” column posted to the Daily Beast mere days before the scandal broke. And the details of how their affair came to light only reinforced the prevailing sentiment. The relationship was uncovered during an FBI investigation into harassing emails allegedly sent by Broadwell to a Tampa social planner and unpaid military social liaison Jill Kelley, who many suspect Broadwell considered a romantic rival. At the moment there is zero evidence to suggest this other other woman had an inappropriate relationship with Petraeus, but there is evidence she throws excellent pirate theme parties — at least one of which Petraeus attended with his wife. And Petraeus’s successor in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen is under investigation for inappropriate communication with Jill Kelley.

The story is almost unbelievably salacious, so it’s not surprising that this is probably the most a lot of people have read about sex and the military. But as crazy as the the presumably consensual intimate antics of these few military leaders are, they’re nothing compared to truly shocking issues surrounding sexual assault and harassment in military. The Armed Forces have been plagued by reports of a cultural of dismissal towards sexually harassment and assault: The Defense Department reports about one in three women in the military have been sexually assaulted, compared to one in six civilian women, and the Veteran’s Administration confirms about twenty percent of female Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans having experienced some form of sexual assault or related trauma.

That Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has acknowledged sexual assault is vastly under-counted in official records is both a troubling reminder of how bad the situation has become, and a ray of hope that the administration is willing to have an honest discussion about the issue and work towards fixing it. But in the mean time, we are faced with statistics that add up to a bleak portrait of how alleged serial abusers have thrived in military communities. Most prominent is the case of Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, who has been charged with forcible sodomy, multiple counts of adultery (a violation of military law) and having inappropriate relationships with four female subordinates. The first hearing in his case was last Monday.

Wired says the Pentagon and the Army have gone to “surprising lengths” to keep his case quiet and it shows: It’s hardly a blip on the radar compared to the Petraeus scandal. Certainly, it’s easier to joke about the soap opera plot unfolding among leadership than it is to process the challenges facing women in uniform every day for merely being female. But at the core of the Petraeus scandal are people who  have spent significant portions of their lives deep in a culture with some very troubling norms about gender, and disturbing treatment of sexual violence. The Petraeus-Broadwell connection could even be seen as an extension of those dynamics: On one level, it’s a high powered authority figure who had a sexual relationship with someone who considered him a mentor — Petraeus was on Broadwell’s PhD advisory board,  in addition to being the subject of her dissertation, and would have far outranked her during their overlapping time in the military.

Of course, such a legendarily disciplined leader couldn’t possibly be equally culpable, so we get to read story after story hitting all the familiar schadenfruede and slut-shaming notes like high school style gossip about Broadwell’s tight clothes in Afghanistan and her ”shameless self-promoting prom queen” persona. But the real scandal isn’t that yet another powerful man cheated on his wife. It’s that we have all the time to spend going through their dirty laundry, and almost none to spare to encourage the military to thoroughly clean house when it comes to sexual predators and the practices that protect them.