Maybe it's not that mysterious why the upper ranks of the GOP and the Far Right are overflowing with homophobic closet cases

Miss Mitch and Lucky Lindsey wonder (or maybe just
make us wonder): Are there straight male Republicans?

"[Filmmaker Kirby] Dick argues that the political closet has grown more oppressive in recent years, largely thanks to the Republican Party's fervent embrace of anti-gay policies, which has sent lesbian and gay conservatives scurrying for cover."

-- Andrew O'Hehir, in a Salon.com column,
"Behind Washington's closet door"

by Ken

I'm always impressed as well as grateful when someone can make sense for me of apparently irreconcilable phenomena. Often once the connection has been made it seems obvious, even blindingly so, but that doesn't make me any less grateful for the help in making the connection.

It happened again when I read Howie's Thursday night post, "Conservative Gay Lawmakers Rejecting a Degrading Life in the Closet" (referring, alas, not to American conservatives but to British Conservatives), and followed the two Salon.com links he provided in the last paragraph. Not that Howie doesn't always provide us with valuable links, but these two struck me as especially valuable.

There was, first, the interview with writer James Hannaham, conducted during the book tour for his first novel, God Says No, about salaciously sinful life in the deep closet of the hard-core Christian Deep South. And then there was the one Howie described as "an even more direct must-read," indie-film columnist Andrew O'Hehir's "Behind Washington's closed door," about (and including an interview with) Outrage filmmaker Kirby Dick.

Is there anyone within shouting distance who hasn't been serially confounded, even dumbfoundewd, by the ever-growing number of homophobic closet cases crawling, or more often being smoked, out of the woodwork of the leadership of America's Far Right and Republican Party (functionally the same things these days)? As Howie has been noting, in places like South Carolina, it's enough to make a person wonder if there are any straight male Republicans. Well, Dick and O'Hehir have an answer, and again, obvious as it seems once it's been laid out, it's a connection I didn't make.

I'm also grateful to Howie for trying to pin down the meaning, or rather meanings, of being "in the closet," which are a whole lot more various than most of us tend to assume. And here I need to backtrack a bit.

It should go without saying that Howie has always been more 'in the know" than I have -- and for us "always" dates back to about 1961. But going back just a number of years (don't ask me how many years; at a certain age your sense of time goes all out of whacks, and things that happened maybe 30 years ago feel like "a few years ago," while more recent events could have taken place anywhere between two and 20 years ago), it used to drive me crazy when Howie would write or tell me that "everybody knew" so-and-so (fill in the name of a closeted public figure) was gay when I sure didn't. I didn't know much about much of anybody who was gay. Liberace, OK, but J. Edgar Hoover? (Bad example, perhaps -- in so many ways.)

The real eye-opener for me, and I can still hardly recommend the book highly enough, was Mike Signorile's Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power, which has what were for me fog-lifting treatments of three related but quite different power closets in American life: in the New York-centric media, the D.C.-centric federal government, and the Hollywood-centric entertainment industry.

It was from Signorile that I came to understand the phenomenon of "everybody knows"-type closets. Within their worlds, he explains, everybody does know, and the filthy preverts are free to practice their vile preversions -- as long as they do so discreetly and never, ever rock the boat. "Keep the faith," as it were, meaning the faith of rigid social orthodoxy, and they will never be outed.

And for many gays, especially of the older generations, the deal worked fine, because they were so thoroughly filled with internalized homophobia -- another subject about which I learned worlds from Mike Signorile -- that by and large they believed as strongly as their oppressors that their homosexuality is a disgusting, degrading preversion, for which they should feel the deepest shame. This is the internalizing of all those screamingly hateful voices we grow up with.

And it's the internalized homopobia, Signorile helped me to understand, that has kept so many gay folk imprisoned in their closets. To which, by the way, James Hannaham adds a fabulous insight in the Salon.com interview: that for many of the afflicted, the shamefulness and sordidness themselves become erotic turn-ons. And so it has been that in those "closets of power" the homophobic enforcers and their internalized-homophobic closet-case victims coexisted in mutually assured harmony.

Which doesn't mean that there weren't still more deeply closeted gays in the ranks of the Right, and in particular Far Right. Adding Hannaham's insight we can see that far from being stymied by the shamefulness of it, the shamefulness added to the thrill of the hunt. It may be that not even the homo-hating homos really understood how far from alone they were, and are.

My favorite example came from David Brock's invaluable memoir Blinded by the Right, in which he recalled his dual "coming out": his awakening from his former existence as a hard-core -- the hardest of the hard -- Far Right-wing attack "journalist" (see note below* on the use of quotation marks around "journalist") and the outing of what he thought was the darkest and terriblest of all possible dark and terrible secrets: that he's gay. In this case, clearly, by "being gay" we mean not the "everybody knows" kind, but the "I'll die if anybody finds out" kind.

Which doesn't mean, by the way, that Brock's secret was necessarily totally, impenetrably secret. Remember, since he was reasonably discreet about his preversion and publicly preached the full gospel of the Wacko Homo-Hating Right, he would in any case have been protected by the Don't Tell, Don't Complain compact.

Inevitably, though, there came a time -- by amazing coincidence the very same time that Brock was finding himself slipping out of the Wacko Right belief set he had so long sworn by (and made such a handsome living by) -- when he was made aware that his secret not only wasn't secret but was about to be made very public. He's vivid in his description of his terror. Outing meant certain ostracism by all the good Far Right folk who had been his community, his mainstay and nurturers. The revelation that he was this secret monster would mean the end of everything.

That's not quite what happened, though, when he walked the plank and outed himself. He found all those hideous creeps he had expected to scorn him hitting on him! (Well, I mean, have you seen pictures of the guy back then? The phrase "to die for" leaps to mind.)

Now if someone as deeply entrenched in the bosom of the virulently, violently homophobic Far Right had no clue, it's hardly likely that the rest of us should be clued in. And while we still need a proper psychological understanding of the kinship between self-hating homosexuality and far-right-wing politics (the affinity can't be accidental, can it?), the above-noted insight provided by Andrew O'Hehir in collaboration with Outrage filmmaker Kirby Dick does, I think, explain why, at a time when so many LGBT people, now able to accept the naturalness of our various sexual attractions (bye-bye, internatlized homophobia!), have left the closet behind, on the oppressive Far Right the closet-builders can barely keep up with the demand for new, even more heavily fortified models.

As I said, it sounds ridiculously simple once you've heard it, but then, so did the whole concept of gravity once the famous apple-plunking opened Sir Isaac Newton's eyes:

Dick argues, in fact, that the political closet has grown more oppressive in recent years, largely thanks to the Republican Party's fervent embrace of anti-gay policies, which has sent lesbian and gay conservatives scurrying for cover. He agrees that politicians, whether gay or straight, out or closeted, are entitled to some degree of personal privacy. A politician who is cheating on his wife with a man is not inherently more newsworthy than one cheating with a woman. But a politician who is voting for a rabidly anti-gay agenda while seeking out anonymous gay sex partners in bathrooms, in his view, is a dangerous hypocrite and very likely a disordered personality. In voting against his own natural interests, that politician is directly damaging gays and lesbians, and depriving the entire country of an honest debate about policies and attitudes on homosexuality.

*Note on the need for quotation marks around "journalist" as applied to practitioners on the Far Right: As I've written numerous times, the single most important revelation in Blinded by the Right is David Brock's discovery that what right-wing "journalists" practice has nothing to do with actual journalism, that he and his colleagues approached every story with all elements predetermined by their rigid ideological gridwork. "Reporting" then consisted of finding stuff with which to embellish this invented "truth": facts if possible, but factoids would be just as good, and ditto hearsay, lies, and on-the-spot totally made-up stuff.

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