Scapegoating gay Republicans
Rights advocates worry that the Mark Foley scandal could trigger gay-bashing by conservatives. But the loudest voice criticizing GOP gays is a gay Democrat.
By Alex Koppelman
Read more: Republican Party, Politics, News, Barney Frank, 2006 Elections, Alex Koppelman
Oct. 10, 2006 | Ever since the Mark Foley scandal began to raise questions about how much Republican House leaders knew about the former Florida congressman's page problems, there have been whispers that the political mess could become an excuse for the GOP to bash gays. The same day that Foley's lawyer announced that his client was gay (an open secret around the nation's capital), CBS News reported that a senior House Republican "says there's a lot of anger at what he describes as 'a network of gay staffers and gay members who protect each other and did the speaker a disservice.'" On his blog the next day, the Nation's David Corn reported that a list of closeted gay GOP staffers had been sent to at least seven conservative Christian groups in an attempt to "set off a civil war within the GOP, to turn the anti-gay social cons against the GOP's Velvet Mafia."
But the first public shots in the war have been fired not by GOP leaders or the Christian right but by a Washington-based gay rights activist and Democrat, Michael Rogers. Known for a 2004 campaign to out closeted GOP gays, Rogers, a little grayer and just as scruffy and intense, is now threatening to use his blog to name gay staffers working for GOP leaders he alleges have been involved in covering up the Foley scandal.
Around midnight on Monday night, Rogers posted an e-mail he'd sent to senior staff members of the House Ethics Committee, alleging that two senior House staffers are gay. "I respectfully request you to investigate these two men," he wrote. "They have good personal reasons for perhaps being involved in this outrageous Foley scandal and cover up." (After commenters on his blog pointed out that one of the men no longer worked in the House, Rogers acknowledged his mistake -- but left the name up.) Over the next several weeks, Rogers says, he will regularly release the names of important people on the Hill he calls hypocrites -- closeted gays who push antigay policies or work for antigay politicians. He'll mostly be outing congressional staffers, he says, but he may name two members of Congress as well. And he'll be asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate everyone he names and what role they may have played in helping to cover up evidence about former Rep. Foley's relations with House pages. Rogers wants that investigation to include Foley aide Kirk Fordham and former Clerk of the House (and ex-GOP staffer) Jeff Trandahl, two gay men who by most accounts were involved in the House leadership's 2005 confrontation with Foley, as well as the other staffers he named Monday and those he says he'll name in the future.
The ethics of a gay rights advocate trying to blame gays for the Foley scandal -- when, in fact, it may be gay Republicans who finally stopped Foley's predation -- don't trouble Rogers.
"Unfortunately, because of the destructive nature of the closet, I have no idea how far-reaching this may or may not be," says Rogers, referring to rumors that gays protected Foley. "And at this point, to do anything other than to report the names of as many antigay closeted officials to the committee as I can, I don't know what else to do. These people clearly could be in on the whole thing. We have no idea, and they need to be investigated." Rogers denies that he is responsible for circulating the list Corn blogged about, even though he hosts it in the left column of his own blog.
Rogers insists that outing closeted GOP gays is justified because under George W. Bush the Republican Party has courted conservative Christians who are hostile to gay rights, even though some Republican politicians, including conservatives who support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, employ staffers whom they know to be gay. Similar rationales have been used to defend earlier outing campaigns -- most notably journalist Michelangelo Signorile's outing of Defense Department spokesman Pete Williams and other closeted gays in the late '80s and early '90s, and Rogers' earlier 2004 crusade against gay Bush backers.
But not everyone agrees with the tactic this time around. Two years ago, Americablog founder John Aravosis vocally supported Rogers' outing campaign, even assisted him with it. This time Aravosis won't be helping. Aravosis is offended that the idea of a gay network protecting Foley is being floated, whether by the right or by the left, noting that the idea would be considered bigotry if anyone other than gay people were involved.
"The concern people have had all week is that the religious right and the media would try to turn this into a gay story, and it's happened," Aravosis said. "All of a sudden we're talking about pedophiles, so now let's talk about gays. When Jack Abramoff came up, we didn't have a discussion about rich Jews. That would have been considered poor form; actually, it would have been bigoted."
Rogers says he's not worried about any negative effects, either on gays generally or on the gays targeted by his outing campaign. "I think it's to the movement's benefit to expose people who are antigay and hypocrites," Rogers says. "Ultimately, what it shows is that these men were so afraid of being honest about who they were that they helped to facilitate the immoral, unethical and possibly illegal activities of Mark Foley."
Whether Rogers' campaign will trigger a GOP civil war between socially tolerant Republicans and the strongly antigay Christian right is an open question. Conservative activists and two gay former GOP staffers contacted by Salon had mixed takes on that. What's clear is that the Foley scandal has focused attention on several gay Republicans besides Foley who played a role in the case, most notably Fordham and Trandahl. Both were known to be gay within the Washington political world, but not outside it. Neither was fully out, if "out" entails an unequivocal public confirmation of one's orientation.
