Crossfire

In the bars and clubs frequented by Washington's gay men, a new character has recently cropped up: the hammered gay Republican. Until recently, says one gay Republican lobbyist, his counterparts on the Hill "had reached a point where you come to your work, you do a good job, you don't cause problems for your boss, and you go home." But then along came the Mark Foley scandal, with its rightwing anti-gay moralizing, liberal snickers about closeted hypocrisy, and a merciless wave of Internet gossip and "outings." The lobbyist says he assumes every gay Republican staffer is "terrified right now." And that has been enough to drive some of them to the bottle. One gay Washingtonian recalls running into an aide to a senior House Republican at a gay bar soon after FoleyGate broke: "He went out to get shitfaced, because he was so stressed out." Chris Crain, a blogger and former editor of the Washington Blade, a gay weekly in Washington, D.C., also says such encounters have become typical. "This weekend, I noticed that the gay Republicans I saw were notably more inebriated than usual. I think they were self-medicating--and I can't blame them."Not at all. You'd probably drink hard, too, were you in such a socially and politically impossible position. For the dozens of gay Republicans on Capitol Hill--including senior aides to some of the most powerful and moralistic members of the House and Senate--the past few weeks have been a nightmare. On the right, gay Republicans face the likes of Tony Perkins and Pat Buchanan implying that the so-called "velvet mafia" enabled Foley's depredations and claiming linkage between pedophilia and homosexuality. On the left, meanwhile, are gay liberals furious over the Bush-era GOP's gay-baiting and increasingly willing to "out" the Republican regime's closeted enablers--with the help of their tell-all blogs. (Gay political circles have recently been abuzz with talk about "The List," a roster of allegedly gay GOP staffers that has circulated among political journalists and activists.) "These people feel under siege in their own party and also under siege in the gay community," says Crain. The Foley story will blow over eventually, but, given the de facto left-right alliance against them, gay Republicans might be knocking them back for a while to come. Not that gay Republicans have ever had it easy, of course. For decades, they tended to be closeted entirely--some in the tragically warped model of Joseph McCarthy's henchman, Roy Cohn, who bashed deviants by day and slept with them at night. Or Terry Dolan, co-founder of the vituperative National Conservative Political Action Committee, who, like Cohn, died of aids. By the 1990s, gay Republicans had evolved into a defined party interest group, complete with their own lobbying arm in the Log Cabin Republicans. But the GOP establishment was slow to accept the change. In 1995, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole actually returned a $1,000 contribution to his campaign from the Log Cabin Republicans. During a debate over gay marriage the following year, then-Representative (and now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma seemed to speak for his party's religiousconservative wing when he said that homosexuality is "immoral ... based on perversion ... based on lust." Even if conservatives never quite embraced the gay politicos within their ranks, however, they rarely turned the screws on them. Rather than eat their own, conservatives smeared Democrats, as when the GOP spread baseless rumors that then-Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley was gay. "We hear it's little boys, " an aide to Newt Gingrich whispered to the New York Daily News. (Sorry, wrong Foley!) Instead, "outing" became the pastime of a gay left furious over the aids epidemic. One early victim was the closeted Wisconsin Republican Representative Steve Gunderson, whose voting record drew the aids activists' ire. At a bar one night in 1991, Gunderson was confronted by the activist Michael Petrelis, who furiously demanded, "When are you going to come out?" Petrelis then dumped a Coke on Gunderson before being dragged away. Under relentless pressure from other gay activists (and a few pile-ons from Republicans like Bob Dornan), Gunderson eventually outed himself. Likewise, Jim Kolbe, a gay representative from Arizona who is retiring this year, outed himself in 1996 to preempt the gay newsmagazine Advocate from doing it for him. And, when Arthur Finkelstein--a GOP consultant who produced savage ads for anti- gay candidates like Jesse Helms--was outed the same year, the deed was done by Boston magazine, hardly a right-wing outlet. After a lull, the liberal outing machine sprang back into action a couple of years ago, as the Bush-DeLay GOP whipped its base into a frenzy over the specter of gay marriage. By then, the outing technology had surpassed dumping drinks on an offender's head; one gay activist with a blog could single- handedly out dozens of Republicans. That's just what a D.C.-based blogger named Michael Rogers began doing around the time of the 2004 congressional gay marriage debate. One early casualty was Virginia GOP Representative Ed Schrock, a rock-ribbed Navy veteran who had co-sponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment. Days after Rogers, working from his apartment in Washington's gay-friendly Adams Morgan neighborhood, posted messages allegedly recorded on a gay phone- sex line by the representative, Schrock retired. Rogers also targeted a slew of congressional staffers, including Robert Traynham, communications director to Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who had bizarrely lumped gay marriage with "man-on-dog" sex. Santorum was ultimately forced to release a statement saying he stands by Traynham, whom he described as a target of partisan-based bigotry. Rogers also zeroed in on a staffer for Oklahoma right-winger Jim Inhofe, who has said he does not hire openly gay or lesbian staffers and once declared himself "really proud" that his recorded family history included no gay relationships. But, as Rogers gleefully revealed, the staffer had posed for a fleshy photo spread in a local gay weekly in which he mused about finding a man with "six-pack abs you could eat chip and dip off of." (In response, Inhofe's office drew a distinction between the senator's personal staff and his committee staff, on which the man worked.) Another senior party operative, Rogers revealed, had posted an online personal ad declaring him to be "just looking for good sex, whether with one or several." Rogers and other gay media outlets had also chronicled Mark Foley's sexuality, a likely reason Foley never tried to run for Senate in Florida. Even without the likes of Rogers, gay Republicans had been ostracized in Washington's mostly liberal gay community. "After the marriage amendment, that changed everything," a liberal gay activist explains. He recounts a recent night when a stranger began chatting up his friend in a bar. The ensuing conversation went something like this: "Where do you work?" "In the government." "Where in the government?" "In the Senate." "Oh. Who do you work for?" The answer came: a highly conservative senator who had championed the 2004 Federal Marriage Amendment. "You gotta be kidding me!" the activist snapped in disgust, breaking off the encounter. Still, it's not likely that this poor scorned Republican is in danger of an outing. In the wake of the Foley scandal, even some gay Democratic partisans think it's best to ease up the public pressure on their GOP counterparts. "Politically, I think [outing] is a stupid idea right now," says John Aravosis, a prominent D.C.-based gay blogger who has supported outing in the past. "The Republicans are imploding--we don't need to draw attention to ourselves. And this story is already in enough danger of becoming a `gay story.' We don't need to help it." Crain adds that, whatever frustrations gay liberals might have with their GOP counterparts, their cause benefits if senators like Santorum have regular contact with gays and lesbians--coming to know them as real people and not the perverted caricatures of James Dobson books. But gay Republicans are hardly off the hook. In the private sphere, their lives are more perilous than ever. For pure vitriol, it would be hard to top an episode that occurred late last month at a Washington dinner party. The gathering included both well-connected Bush administration and congressional GOP staffers and several Democrats--all gay. Inevitably, politics came up. One Democrat in attendance, a former Clinton White House aide, couldn't contain his revulsion at the gay men working in the service of the enemy. "I ripped into this one guy" who works for the Bush administration, the Democrat says. "I said, `What you do for a living is hurting me, and my family, and my daughter I have with two lesbians. I personally view Bush as the most corrupt, vile politician in the world, and if you're working for him, to me you're one and the same.' People were horrified." But, he adds, "I refuse to be cordial or friendly or polite to these people. I think they are our mortal enemy. They ask the gay community to indulge them when they want a social life, but when they punch the clock they are trying to tear apart our families. They want it both ways." Even a few weeks later, says another gay Washingtonian who was not present at the dinner, the former Clinton aide's "little screed is legendary." And there are still lone liberal gunmen like Michael Rogers. His goal is to touch off an internal war within the GOP that ultimately brings down the party. He has vowed to out several more GOP staffers between now and Election Day, and says at least one influential conservative leader has cheered him on via e-mail. When I spoke to him this week, he boasted that he had just gotten off the phone with an official at a leading conservative organization, one of whose other senior officials he was about to out. "I think the Foley story ultimately brings to light the fact that the far right wing in America has been duped by the leadership of the GOP," he says, noting that he's communicated directly on the subject with some Christian conservative leaders. With bizarre bedfellows like that, you can't blame a gay Capitol Hill Republican for hitting the bars-- and making it a double.