Wave of outings hits Congress

MarcusGarvey

http://www.washblade.com/2004/6-18/news/national/wave.cfm

The proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage has revived a debate over the ethics of outing those closeted gay men and lesbians in a position to affect public policy.

On the day after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) reportedly told Christian leaders that the Senate will vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment in July, well-known D.C. activist John Aravosis issued a call for the names of gay congressional members, staffers and their associates to publicly out them.

“If you’re gay and you support making sexual orientation a political weapon, then your sexual orientation is fair game, and you will be outed to the rafters,” Aravosis said.

It’s a campaign predicted months ago by Steve Gunderson, the former Republican Congressman who came out a decade ago after facing outing threats, and one that other former members of the Austin 12 — the group of gay Republicans who met with President Bush during the 2000 campaign — tried to prevent.

But the current political climate and the renewed anger of gay rights advocates has once again forced open the Pandora’s box, according to Gunderson.

“I think it will get uglier than anything we saw on AIDS,” Gunderson told Newsweek magazine in March. “This country will be more polarized than we’ve been in decades.” He did not return repeated phone calls from the Blade.

Aravosis’s battle cry comes two weeks after another vocal activist, Mike Rogers, started phoning closeted gay aides at the offices of congressional members who backed the FMA. He began by urging them to come out in an effort to persuade their members to change their stance on the contentious amendment.

If they pledged to take a more personal role on gay rights, Rogers said, the conversation ended. If they didn’t, he placed calls to the chief of staff in that member’s office or to another senior aide.

“I asked them how their congressman could justify supporting the FMA knowing that his long-term aide was gay,” said Rogers, a former staff member of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. “Those in public positions who support homophobia or work for someone who supports homophobia can no longer secretly enjoy the protections the gay community has afforded them.”

Rogers said he has so far contacted six offices that he says employ gay aides on both the Senate and the House sides of Capitol Hill. As he gathers more information, he said, he will phone more.

The office of Rep. Charles Stenholm (D-Texas) took one of Roger’s first calls and reacted the most forcefully by filing a harassment report with the Capitol police, according to Rogers.

Proclaiming himself as a liberator of closeted gay staffers, Rogers says he outed one of Stenholm’s former staffers, a lesbian who worked very closely with the Texas politician. Both the aide, who left Washington several months ago, and Stenholm’s office declined to comment on Rogers’ act, but Rogers said police involvement only ensured that Stenholm discovered what he has called the ex-aide’s hypocrisy.

Stenholm, the co-chair of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition of conservative Democrats, has firmly backed the Federal Marriage Amendment.

“This isn’t a partisan issue, and it is not a witch hunt,” Rogers said. “Being outed is an empowerment tool. I’m telling the truth to save their lives.”

Rogers’ personal crusade has motivated fellow converts, including Aravosis, and they have also started their own efforts to expose gay aides. A widely circulated flier at last week’s Capital Pride festival encouraged attendees to e-mail an anonymous Hotmail account with the names of closeted senators, representatives and staff members.

“Do not protect homophobes and the people who keep them in power,” the leaflet read.


Some warn outings can backfire
On the Hill, sentiment is split over outing.

Gay Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said he endorses the practice in limited circumstances.

“I am not inclined to do it, but I think if the congressman is rabidly anti-gay, it’s appropriate,” Frank said. “You don’t have a right to be a hypocrite; you don’t have a right to exempt yourself from the negative things you do to other people.”

Frank has said he came out voluntarily in May 1987, two years before facing a scandal involving a gay escort with whom Frank was associated while still closeted.

Some Hill aides, especially those who are gay, have taken a stronger stance against outing their ranks. Many oppose outing in all circumstances, labeling it as “ridiculous” and “ineffective.”

“Most likely you’re hurting the cause by alienating a gay staffer or potentially removing that staffer from the office,” said Lynden Armstrong, an aide to Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and a founder of a professional association of gay Senate staffers, the Senate GLASS Caucus. “It angers me whenever I hear of gay people doing that to other gay people. It’s accomplishing nothing while demonstrating insensitivity to a very personal process.”

Armstrong said the GLASS Caucus had not taken any position against the outing campaign. Instead, he offered support to outed staffers or those who wished to openly declare their orientation.


Second round of political outings
Ten years ago, Gunderson faced the threat of being outed from both sides of the political spectrum; first from gay activists unhappy with his opposition to gay rights, and then from archconservative Bob Dornan, a Republican congressman then representing an Orange County district in California, who criticized Gunderson’s “revolving closet” in a famous 1994 speech on the floor of the House.

Two years later, Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) faced a similar threat when he received word that Advocate magazine was working on a story outing him after he voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans federal recognition of same-sex marriages. The Advocate was reporting on an advertisement in the Washington Blade placed by a number of gay D.C. activists, taking to task closeted gay members of Congress — without naming them — for voting in favor of DOMA.

Assuming that the Blade ad and the Advocate were poised to out him, Kolbe promptly held a press conference revealing his sexual orientation.

“That I am a gay person has never affected the way that I legislate,” Kolbe said at the time. “Even members of Congress should be allowed to have personal lives.”

Advocate Editorial Director Judy Weider has said since then that the magazine had at the time only been considering whether to out Kolbe. Unbeknownst to Kolbe, news staffers were in fact ordered against doing so by the gay magazine’s publisher, who worried that straight advertisers would object.

But following those very public decisions, both Gunderson and Kolbe became more supportive of gay and lesbian rights issues than they had been while closeted. Gunderson, who maintained a close friendship and working relationship during that period with GOP firebrand Newt Gingrich, even went on to sit on the board of the Human Rights Campaign.

Still, the outing threats outraged some gays and a serious debate ensued about the morality of outing, which more or less quieted the practice for the remainder of the decade.

When Kolbe came out eight years ago, Gunderson said then that he didn’t believe in outing, but that everybody should be out because it continued to break down stereotypes.

Gay advocacy organizations, including the Log Cabin Republicans and the Human Rights Campaign have also made it clear that outing campaigns will not have their support. LCR officials have described outing as a Washington attempt to break a story or score partisan political points.

The circumstances may have changed, but these groups have made it clear that Aravosis, Rogers and others who engage in outing face alienation by their own allies in the battle for gay rights.

“Coming out should be their choice to make, not ours,” HRC President Cheryl Jacques said.

Proponents of outing, however, remain undeterred. They continue to assert that outing is the most effective and quickest way to win coverts to the cause, however forceful it may be.

“The closet is our worst enemy. Look how Barney, Gunderson and Kolbe came into the cause,” Rogers said. “They were dragged out, but now they’re some of our most vocal advocates.”

Frank, to the contrary, has said he came out because he was “motivated by two factors: my deep personal unhappiness with my life as a closeted public person, and my view that it would be helpful in our fight against homophobia if I joined approximately 432 of my House colleagues in being honest about my sexual orientation.”

MarcusGarvey

So, what are peoples opinions on these outings ? If a TD here was supportive of anti-gay laws and you knew he himself was gay but closeted would you out him ? Is it okay to out people if they are being hypocrites or is it never okay to out people ?

Stark

It's never okay to out people in my opinion, even if they are being hypocrites. If someone is against gay rights, their morals should be questioned, not their sexuality,

ixoy

I can't believe that it's okay to out people either, hypocrite or not. Alas it's still a personal thing and many elements are going to influence a person. Now sure there's a certain irony in that some of these politicians are partially responsible for creating the circumstances of fear, and segregation that make it difficult to be outed in the first place but, much like Stark says, they should be attacked for their moral code regardless of their sexuality.