Anti gay republicans caught being gay

Secret gay life of married 'family values' lawmaker was not so secret

COLUMBUS, Ohio — As Wes Goodman built a political career around values including “committed natural marriage,” the 33-year-old Republican was secretly engaging in sexual encounters with men online, via cellphone and, on one significant occasion, in his articulate office.

The office encounter was the final straw that last week ended his political rise as a self-proclaimed Christian conservative, which had taken Goodman from congressional campaign worker to Capitol Hill aide to a seat in the Ohio House.

It also opened the floodgates on details of Goodman’s secret homosexual life, which turned out not to have been a secret to several conservative groups, House Republicans or their campaign operation.

The nation’s leading anti-gay marriage organization, Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community Values, was among the Christian conservative groups that knew of Goodman’s extramarital sexual contact with other men before his election last year, The Associated Press has learned.

Board member Seth Morgan said the group discovered — after it had endorsed him in last year’s legislative primary — that Goodman had engaged

Robert Bauman

Congressional portrait of Robert Bauman, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from August 21, 1973 to January 3, 1981. Credit: Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives.

 

Episode Notes

In 1980, conservative congressman Robert Bauman was caught soliciting sex from a 16-year-old boy. The scandal landed the married father of four on the front page of newspapers across the territory. It spelled the conclude of his political career—and the start of a years-long journey toward self-acceptance.

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Learn more about Robert Bauman in this limited congressional biography and this 2012 Washington Blade interview. Or have a watch at his autobiography, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Queer Conservative, which was published in 1986; you can read a review here. 

In the 1970s, Bauman was a rising star among conservative Republicans of the New Right. A 1976 New York Times article that Eric Marcus quotes from in the episode described Bauman as the “gadfly of the Property, its most active nit-picker, its hairshirt, its principal baiter of its most powerful members”; read the article in its entirety here. He was a founder of conservative groups i

Calls for Arrest of Openly-Gay GOP Convention Speaker Reveal Menace of Sodomy Laws Nationwide, ACLU Says

July 31, 2000 12:00 am


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK, NY -- As one of the nation's largest conservative groups called for the arrest of an openly-gay Republican Congressman who is slated to speak tomorrow blackout at the Republican national convention in Philadelphia, the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Lgbtq+ Rights Project today said there can no longer be any doubt about the imminent menace posed by sodomy laws.

In recent days, the American Family Association began circulating an action attentive, titled "Arrest Mr. Kolbe." The watchful notes that Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) is scheduled to address the convention tomorrow night. It also notes that sodomy is illegal in Arizona.

"Time and time again when we file lawsuits challenging sodomy laws, conservative groups disagree that these laws are not enforced and do not present any true danger -- but that they should remain on the books to mail a moral message," said Michael Adams, Associate Director of the ACLU Female homosexual and Gay Rights Project.

"By issuing this callous alert, the right wing has demonstrated the very real dan

Bush campaign chief, former RNC chair: I'm gay

Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this finding about his persona fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private being, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

"It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life," said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. "Everybody has their hold path to explore , their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that's made me a happier and enhanced person. It's something I wish I h

Cynics, Hypocrites, and Nasty Boys: Senator Larry Craig and Gay Rights Caught in the Grotesque Frame

C. Wesley Buerkle, East Tennessee Articulate University

Abstract

In 2007 US Senator Larry Craig plead responsible to soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, a notable irony as he has a consistent record of voting against gay-rights. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart sought to punish Craig for homophobia by hoisting him with his own homophobic petard, using homosexuality as a punch line. Turning to Burke to untangle this rhetorical knot, we see The Daily Show providing a grotesque response to Craig’s troubles. As a transitional frame, the grotesque has received relatively little scholarly attention, due in part to the fact that this particular response to social and political strife does little to resolve the conflict at hand. As analysis shows, by punishing Craig as a grotesque figure while using a strategy of prejudice he, himself, would engage (i.e., homophobia) the social and political struggle over gay-rights becomes mired in cynical mud rather than providing either defense for homosexual acceptance or potential for Craig’s personal redemption. By contrast, we

anti gay republicans caught being gay