Sexpo '76

Gender, Media, and the 1976 Hays-Ray Congressional Sex Scandal

Abstract

In May 1976, a secretary named Elizabeth Ray set off a summer of sex scandal when she revealed to the press that her boss, the powerful congressman Wayne Hays, had kept her on the payroll for sexual rather than clerical duties. While illicit sex had long been a topic of gossip in Washington, the Hays-Ray affair marked a turning point in the media’s relationship to scandal politics, even as it demonstrated how much of the American political culture continued to be defined according to the terms of hegemonic masculinity. This article analyzes the public debate—and the discursive silences—through the lenses of gender and sexuality to explore ways that the twin revolutions of feminism and sexual expressiveness affected the discourse around national politics in this era, including how women’s increased political power was challenging the unspoken privileges associated with white men’s political dominance, as well as the ways that those challenges were defused in order to maintain existing power arrangements. I argue that the media discourse around the Hays-Ray scandal avoided critiquing gendered and sexualized relationships of power. Even when airing dirty laundry, members of the news and popular media revered in theory the strict boundary between a politician’s private life and his public life. In so doing, they expanded the social ethic of sexual liberalism by refusing to condemn political figures for extramarital or kinky sex undertaken “in private.” Politicians, entertainers, and journalists alike insisted, contrary to the calls for women’s liberation, that the personal was not political. To the contrary, they fed the scandal in order to draw attention to what they saw as the “real” issues of political corruption. Elizabeth Ray’s name and body became part of the shared cultural vocabulary through which Americans in the Bicentennial and scandal-ridden summer 1976 mediated their relationship to a disappointing “establishment.” They framed the Hays-Ray affair as noteworthy and problematic, but only in ways that left heteromasculine privilege intact.