IGF CultureWatch

Mike Rogers of blogActive.com is riding high these days. The scourge of anti-gay politicians who engage in gay sex themselves has been proved right in his charges last October that Idaho Senator Larry Craig was seeking gay sex in public restrooms. In the last few weeks, Rogers has been profiled by the Washington Post, interviewed by cable TV hosts Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews, and called the most feared man on Capitol Hill. The blogosphere has breached the wall of the mainstream media (MSM) that once would have ignored his efforts as unseemly.

I have mixed feelings on the question of outing anti-gay politicians. On the one hand, I agree with Congressman Barney Frank's dictum that "People have a right to privacy, but not to hypocrisy." I am as sick as anyone of being demonized by ruthless political operatives to turn out socially conservative voters. On the other hand, I am troubled by outing as a tactic because it capitalizes on people's homophobia, and it too seems ruthless. Rogers and outing pioneer Michelangelo Signorile reject the term "outing" in favor of "reporting," but the latter is less precise.

I encountered Rogers at a reception Sept. 6 at the Smithsonian Institution honoring 82-year-old gay pioneer Frank Kameny, whose picket signs from the first gay protest outside the White House in 1965 are included in a new exhibit titled "Treasures of American History." The classy affair had a lot of gay movers and shakers and good food and drink. I chatted with Rogers, who is quite affable personally, and he mentioned his next target, another Republican senator. He was praised by several guests, including a disillusioned gay Republican. Rogers acknowledged some awkwardness, as a Republican staffer whom he outed last year stood a few yards away.

As I told Rogers, I am especially opposed to his outing of GOP staffers. Over the years, gay rights activists have obtained a good deal of useful intelligence from Capitol Hill's informal gay network. Often it was staffers for right-wing Republicans who provided the best information at off-the-record meetings. Apparently, I am not the only one: On Monday, via Washington Post "Sleuth" reporter Mary Ann Akers, Rogers announced a change in strategy: he will stop outing staffers. He explained to the Post, "Enough readers expressed concerns that I have decided to now focus on elected officials, those running for office and to high level political appointees in the administration."

Rogers told me that he hates what he does, but he considers it necessary. He thinks it will significantly neutralize the far-right's anti-gay wedge politics. Assuming that is true, I still find it ethically troubling. Vindictiveness hardly seems conducive to expanding support for gay equality, and Rogers's actions smack of vindictiveness even if that is not his intent. You cannot justify playing God by citing the quality of your research.

Looking at Rogers, you might never suspect that he traffics in anyone's sordid secrets. He brings a professional polish to his media appearances. On television he appears relaxed and confident, crisply relays his talking points, and does not stumble or ramble. These skills smoothed his story's transition from the Web to the MSM. Someone who came across as creepy or eccentric would be easier to dismiss.

In January 2006, Rogers sent his then-targeted senator a letter warning him that a vote either for the Federal Marriage Amendment or for the confirmation of Samuel Alito as a Supreme Court justice would lead to the senator's homosexual activities being reported on blogActive.com. Some have suggested that this amounts to criminally punishable blackmail. Legal opinion appears divided on that question, but legality aside, it sure looks like blackmail to me. And how does Rogers avoid arbitrariness in choosing which votes justify outing someone? There was no consensus that Alito was anti-gay when he was nominated, and some evidence to the contrary.

Last week, Rogers wrote, "People are finally getting that gay Americans have had enough … Craig's arrest when coupled with the hypocrisy of his seeking sexual encounters from the very men he actively legislates against, becomes merely the catalyst to expose the dishonesty and secrecy of anti-gay politicians who expect a community to harbor its own."

Our movement has seen radical tactics before. In Washington in 1971, gay activists charged into the Shoreham Hotel's Regency Ballroom to zap the convocation of the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), whose definition of homosexuality as a pathology in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was used to justify anti-gay discrimination. During the confusion, Frank Kameny seized the microphone. He denounced the psychiatrists and insisted that homosexuality was an orientation on par with heterosexuality. The electrifying moment was a declaration of war, a war the gay activists won in 1973 when APA declassified homosexuality as an illness.

Are we at a comparable moment, when a violation of protocol is needed to "get things moving," as Kameny has put it? Or does the use of outing go too far? We need a thoughtful and civil discussion about what effect the use of an inherently negative tactic might have on those who employ it and those on whose behalf it is employed.

It may be that before many socially conservative Americans will reconsider their anti-gay stance, they must become disillusioned with their leaders. Yet they might just as readily react to the shock of outings by hardening their hearts further against gay people. That is something Mike Rogers might want to investigate.

Whenever one of these morality scandals erupts - whether it involves homosexuality, adultery, or being on a list compiled by someone the media calls a "Madam" - it often involves a Republican. Critics love to charge Republicans with hypocrisy - preaching traditional family values to the rest of us by day while trolling bathrooms and pressing sweaty palms to computer keyboards by night.

Whatever explains these other public moral dramas, hypocrisy doesn't fully capture the GOP's plainly dysfunctional relationship to homosexuality. Yes, there are many prominent Republicans whose private actions are inconsistent with their traditional-values personas and thus are properly called hypocrites. Sen. Larry Craig is the latest of them. Jim West had an aggressively anti-gay record both as a Washington state legislator and as mayor of Spokane, yet cruised for gay sex and anonymously told an online acquaintance that he hated the "sex Nazis" who try to regulate people's private lives. There are many other examples.

But there are also many closeted gay Republicans not closely associated with the party's religious right for whom the hypocrisy charge is ill-fitting. Mark Foley, of last year's congressional page scandal, was not an anti-gay member of Congress. While he didn't support everything I wish he had, I'd take his record on gay issues over many Democrats'.

Most gay Republicans despise the party's anti-gay rhetoric and actions. They're Republicans because they're pro-life, support low taxes, want a strong national defense, or for any of a hundred other reasons. You could call it hypocrisy to be gay and work for a generally anti-gay political party, regardless of the gay person's own views or what she does within the party to oppose its anti-gay policy positions, but if so, this is surely a watered-down form of the vice.

What unites these scandals is not really hypocrisy. It's two other things. First, nearly all the gay Republicans working in Washington or elsewhere are to one degree or another closeted. Second, at a personal level, very few Republican officials around them care whether someone is gay.

From the top of the party hierarchy to the bottom, few Republicans personally and viscerally dislike gay people. President Bush has had friends he knew were gay. Vice President Cheney's daughter is gay. Even the most prominently and vigorously anti-gay Republican, Sen. Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, had a gay spokesperson whom he defended when his homosexuality became known.

The big, open secret in Republican politics is that everyone knows someone gay these days and very few people - excepting some committed anti-gay activists - really care. It's one of the things that drives religious conservatives crazy because it makes the party look like it's not really committed to traditional sexual morality.

So to keep religious conservatives happy the party has done two things. First, it has supported anti-gay public policies.

Second, to keep the talent it needs and simply to be as humane and decent as politically possible toward particular individuals, the party has come up with its own unwritten code: you can be gay and work here, we don't care, but don't talk about it openly and don't do anything to make it known publicly. It's the GOP's own internal version of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

This is ideological schizophrenia: private acceptance welded to public rejection. It's a very brittle alloy.

For the closeted gay Republican, this alloy means a life of desperation and fear and loneliness, of expressing one's true feelings only in the anonymity of the Internet, of furtive bathroom encounters, of late nights darting in and out of dark bars, hoping not to be seen. It means life without a long-term partner, without real love.

Worst of all, it may mean a life of deceiving a spouse and children. Most of the men caught cruising in parks, bathrooms, and other public places are deeply closeted and often married. They don't see themselves as having many other options.

Nevertheless, it seems to work until the day you get caught tapping your toe next to an overzealous cop. Desperation sets in and you say things that bring everyone great joy at your expense, like, "I'm not gay, I just have a wide stance."

For the GOP, this alloy of public rejection and private acceptance means enduring more of these periodic public morality convulsions. How to end it? The private acceptance will continue and, I predict, become even more common as young conservatives comfortable around gay people take over. There will be no purging the party of gays. There is no practical way to purge them, and even if there were, most Republicans would be personally repulsed by the effort.

These closeted politicians, staffers, and party functionaries will periodically be found out and again will come the shock, the pledges to go into rehab, the investigations, the charges of hypocrisy, the schadenfreude from Democrats and libertines, and the sense of betrayal from the party's religious conservatives.

The only practical way out of this for the GOP is to come to the point where its homosexuals no longer feel the need to hide. And _that_ won't happen until the party's public philosophy is more closely aligned with its private one. That will be the day when the GOP greets its gay supporters the way Larry Craig, with unintended irony, greeted reporters at his news conference: "Thank you all very much for coming out today."

Not long ago, the "family values" crowd thought the best way to oppose gay rights was to slander gay people. To them, being gay was synonymous with behavior that was objectionable, anti-social or illegal. Republican politicians insisted that marriage had to be "defended" from gay couples. Paul Cameron, a "psychologist" whose junk science is still a staple of right-wing Web sites, has written that gay people are "sexual bums" who suffer from a "preoccupation with sex" and "seek excessive distraction" through sex, drugs and other risk-taking behaviors.

The political argument that followed from this picture was simple and insidious: Why should these people be allowed to marry one another, or be protected against hate crimes or job discrimination?

But lately, it seems, Republicans and the religious right have stumbled onto something even more deviously effective. Rather than talking about icky behavior, they are modeling icky behavior, and forcing the rest of us to talk about it. Their antics practically guarantee that the media will discuss homosexuality in the same breath as pedophilia, prostitution and anonymous sexual encounters. This is an evil-genius political strategy worthy of Karl Rove.

Consider:

• Sen. Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican with a 100 percent rating from the American Family Association, unwittingly plays footsy with a cop, gets himself arrested, then goes on television to indignantly declare, "I am not gay!" The impression many Americans get: being gay means picking up men in bathrooms.

• Mark Foley, the former Florida Republican congressman, gets caught having racy online chats with teenage males, resigns from Congress, then blames his behavior on a drinking problem and checks into rehab. The message: gay men are pedophiles, and they deal with their messy, embarrassing lives by turning to alcohol. At best, they're to be pitied. At worst, they're creepy criminals.

• Ted Haggard, the evangelical minister disgraced by allegations by a male prostitute about illicit sex and methamphetamine use, undergoes religious "therapy" and is subsequently pronounced "completely heterosexual." The message: being gay is an illness that causes you to do drugs and hang out with hustlers.

The truth is that these behaviors are not about being gay (any more than Sen. David Vitter's patronage of the D.C. Madam was about being straight). If anything, they are about being closeted and repressed - conditions that Republicans and many churches have encouraged by treating homosexuality as a source of shame rather than a normal human variation.

Through their bumbling and hypocrisy, Haggard, Foley and Craig have not only disgraced themselves, they have inflamed old stereotypes - stereotypes that were being rapidly discarded as more and more gay people came out and shared the realities of their respectable, everyday lives with families and friends.

Now it may be that much more difficult for these same gay citizens to have an informed, rational dialogue with their fellow Americans about legitimate political and legal issues. Even if many Americans have shed old ideas and become more comfortable with homosexuality, will the media give equal time to sober debates about equal marriage rights, hate crimes legislation and job discrimination? Unlikely.

The more they're told about boys, bathrooms and prostitutes, the less Americans will learn about the real lives of their gay neighbors and co-workers. That might be a windfall for anti-gay activists and wedge-issue politicians. But it's a civic and moral disaster for the rest of us.