Gay Conservatives Coming Out? Well... Maybe Joe Blow But Not Aaron Schock Or Patrick McHenry... Or Even David Dreier

Guess who didn't get mentioned in The Advocate's story on conservative closet cases coming out?

Normally, when we think of "gay Republicans" we think of pathological closet cases whose very lives are psychologically debilitating hellish lies. From former Maryland Congressman (and American Conservative Union founder and president) Bob Bauman in his 1986 book about being outed and abandoned by his rightist allies to the more incident in California with state Senator Roy Ashburn the lesson Republicans should be learning is "closets are for clothes," not for dignified human beings. It's virtually impossible to live a worthwhile life as a closet case. Examples include not only recently out wrecks and wretches like Mark Foley (R-FL), Larry Craig (R-ID), Jim West (R-WA) and Ed Schrock (R-VA) and half-in-half-out closet queens like Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Miss McConnell (R-KY) and David Dreier (R-CA) but also hysterically furtive night-prowlers Mark Kirk (R-IL), Aaron Schock (R-IL), Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Adrian Smith (R-NE), and Trent Franks (R-AZ). But, the new issue of the Advocate wants us to know that there's a new breed of conservative Republican gays who are stepping out of the closet.

You've probably never heard of any of them... other than maybe Ken Mehlman, who was outed while plotting the Bush campaign's divisive, hate-filled and ruthless anti-gay strategies. It's mostly about recently uncloseted minor gay staffers in DC, approximately 2/3 of the city's temporary residents. It's a story "of a growing number of Republicans who hope young conservatives no longer feel the need to hide their sexual identity in order to pursue their passion for politics. Their stories vary wildly: Some came out in protest of what they see as a political ethos that fundamentally rejects their humanity, while others say they aren’t so troubled when their professional obligations seem, to others at least, at odds with their sexual orientation. But most believe the unprecedented support of conservative icons such as George W. Bush’s former solicitor general Ted Olson, currently litigating the federal case against California’s antigay Proposition 8, and the recent openness of high-profile operatives like onetime Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman can help motivate aspiring young gays-- and perhaps reshape the national conversation in the process."

If you're hoping Kerry Eleveld actually unlocks the conservative closet... well, you might as well skip the Advocate altogether and stick with the magazine's bulkier fashion/booze-recipes-and-gossip-oriented sister publication, Out. One gay GOP operative, Dan Gurley, was so outraged ("gut-punched," he recalls) when Bush decided to try to pass a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw gay marriage that he adamantly refused to hang a life-size photo of Bush in his office "for months." Now, "in retrospect, Gurley acknowledges that he could have made more of a difference if he’d been out to his RNC colleagues. 'It might have given a heightened sense of awareness to others if everyone had known, rather than some knowing and others not knowing,” he says." You think?

Markos Moulitsas' brilliant new book, American Taliban has a chapter he probably designed to make right-wingers, gay and straight, squirm. It's called "Sex," and I suspect many of the reviewers only read this chapter. "While the lust for power and the flirtation with violence are definitely traits of the American Taliban," he begins, "what really gets their panties in a twist is sex." He could just as well be writing a biographical sketch of Daniel Webster (AKA- "Taliban Dan"), the fanatic, sex-obsessed career politician running against Alan Grayson in the Orlando area of central Florida.

Unlike power and violence, sex is something they are obsessed with avoiding. This creates a paradox: they are so fearful of the pleasures of the flesh that they can't stop talking about them. Or, as we'll see, often indulging in them. Hence they've created an entire regressive moral code, dressed it up as "family values," and set out to violate almost every one of its tenets. All this repression ultimately screws them up in the head.

...Both Christianity and Islam consider homosexuality immoral. Indeed, same-sex relations are illegal in most Muslim countries [though widely practiced], generally punishable by jail time or corporal punishment, and the more extreme the regime, the more brutal the punishment.

In the extremist cult Taliban Dan ascribes to, led by multimillionaire charlatan Bill Gothard (Webster's top advisor) you couldn't get more extreme. Closeted or not, he decrees that all gay men and women should be stoned... to death. But you can kind of see why people growing up in this kind of depraved milieu might chose to bolt that closet door from the inside-- and barricade it shut.

Meet Jamie; she survived Bill Gothard and, unlike Taliban Dan, she broke free: