AMATEUR GAY VIDEO BRINGS PERFORMANCE ART TO SENATE HEARING ROOM
An eight second, amateur, sex video, depicting a naked, leanly muscled man alleged to be a U.S. Senate staffer at the time allegedly engaging in anal sex with a male partner on Wednesday, December 13, 2023 in storied Hart Senate Office Building Hearing Room 216, initially posted to a blog shared among gay politicos in Washington, D.C. and subsequently reported by the Daily Caller and oligopoly news organizations, elicits interest vastly more as performance art unmasking national institutions than for individual tawdriness, incaution, and poor judgement.
Performance art is generally thought of as a creative work depicting an artist’s body in a defined place over a duration of time to engage the public. Philippe Petit’s forty-five minute tightrope walk between Twin Towers rooftops on August 7, 1974 was so successful it won the 24 year-old, French high wire artist accolades for “the crime of the century.” American performance artist Matthew Barney celebrates body and site to engage audiences.
The Senate Hearing Room video represents performance art elements with the performers’ bodies, specific location, duration of time and public engagement.
Absences of understandable dialogue emphasize Hart Senate Hearing Room 216 as the video’s central character. That hearing room expresses place and memory in connection with Judiciary Committee confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brent Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, among other important Senate hearings. Notably, place and memory are staples of American literature and literary history. Toni Morrison memorializes them as there-ness in African-American fiction as does Oliver Anthony in contemporary country music.
Significantly, the two men’s sexual activity highlights the hearing room’s vast emptiness. Nothing is getting done permitting them time and space for a gay romp.
The strangleholds that industrial, financial, commercial, professional and foreign interests (lamented melodically as “Rich Men North of Richmond” in contemporary country music) so constrict oxygen for fact finding and pliancy for deliberation that Senators and Congressmen and women endure inordinate difficulties enacting legislation. The wholesale mismanagement of Congressional legislation, typified by omnibus bills in which members have no choices other than up or down votes and 48 hours or so to evaluate thousands of pages and by continuing resolutions to fund federal government obligations and debt, are among the more disheartening symptoms of Article 1 abuses and failures. The process concentrates authority in House and Senate leadership centralize industry and interest group lobbying to the detriment of legislative deliberation and decision making, and, by so doing, severely curtails Senators’ and Congressmen and women’s abilities to create and dissolve coalitions on issues of concern across party lines for their constituents.
At the point of law making production, therefore, the eight second, amateur porn clip roars volumes about House and Senate capture and sclerosis. It is the sole activity in the space.
As significantly, the video expresses Generation Z’s ease creating uninhibited video content documenting its activities for distinctly, individual expression no matter how intimate or inappropriate.
Daily Caller report of the video afforded an Internet journalism toe hold for the clip to become newsworthy for prestige press and oligopoly news organization news stories reminiscent of Matt Drudge’s January, 1998 Newsweek scoop exposing President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. This was the first step bringing in the public beyond a private, gay chat. The partisan publication indicated that it had “not confirmed the identities of either party in the amateur porn video.” In a short time, Aidan Maese-Czeropski, by then a former staffer for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), was nonetheless reported as one of the alleged participants.
Ensuing oligopoly news organization and prestige press reporting then brought the video clip to mass audiences delivering the public, the remaining element necessary for successful performance art. News commentators and pundits visited penetrating attacks on Maese-Czeropski, the 5’9”, boyishly handsome, 24 year old, for institutional disrespect and self-absorption. While palliating popular indignation, their observations rang as epiphenomenal and self-serving riding one or another hobby-horse thought to gratify news consumers and animate relevance.
Either haplessly or ingeniously Maese-Czeropski, if in fact he is the man in the video, engaged all the elements (body, place, duration, public) of performance art to trigger the bright lights of publicity on institutional failures of the first session of the 118th Congress and oligopoly news organizations. Senator Cardin’s discerning observation that the video’s newsworthiness is “present[ing] a lot of anger and frustration” thoughtfully acknowledged as much.
About two months later, the U.S. Capitol Police released a statement indicating that “there is currently no evidence that a crime was committed…. despite a likely violation of congressional policy,” news stories reported. Pending forthcoming evidence, investigation is suspended. “The two people of interest were not cooperative…. The congressional staffer, who has since resigned from his job, exercised his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and refused to talk to us,” the statement continued.
In this way, a prosecution fade out sustained the integrity of the performance art permitting the eight second clip and its setting to monopolize journalism and commentary.
© Hugh Carter Donahue
Hugh Carter Donahue is author of Oliver Anthony Blue Moon Balladeer distributed by Amazon/Kindle.