Just How Gay Is the
Right?
By FRANK RICH, OP-ED
COLUMNIST, NYTimes on the Web, March 15, 2005
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| Frank Rich, NYT Photo |
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THE screen's first official gay bar,"
as it was labeled by the film historian Vito Russo, appeared in the 1962
political potboiler "Advise and Consent." Its most prominent visitor was a
conservative United States senator.
As sheer coincidence would have it, Otto Preminger's adaptation of Allen Drury's
best seller about a brutal confirmation fight was released on a sparkling new
DVD last week just as the John Bolton nomination was coming to its committee
vote. Like Hollywood's other riveting political movie of 1962, "The
Manchurian Candidate," "Advise and Consent" is fallout from the McCarthy era:
the controversial nominee for secretary of state (Henry Fonda, who else?) is a
stand-in for Alger Hiss. But it may be in even less need of a remake:
the intervening four decades have cast this film in a highly contemporary light.
By all rights "Advise and Consent" should be terribly dated. The cold war
is now so over that the American and Russian presidents are bonding in Red
Square. The film's Kennedy-era ambience -- both a J.F.K. brother-in-law
(Peter Lawford) and former lover (Gene Tierney) are in the cast -- seems as
retro as the Hula-Hoop. But when the pivotal gay plot twist kicks in,
"Advise and Consent" taps into unfinished business that roils the capital as
much, if not more, today than it did then. In 2005, homosexuality is no
longer the love that dare not speak its name (the word is never mentioned in the
movie), but as Washington fights its nuclear war over the judiciary, it is the
ticking time bomb within the conservative movement that no one can defuse.
In "Advise and Consent," the handsome young senator with a gay secret (Don
Murray) is from Utah -- a striking antecedent of the closeted conservative
Mormon lawyer in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." For a public official
to be identified as gay in the Washington of the 50's and 60's meant not only
career suicide but also potentially actual suicide. Yet Drury, a staunchly
anti-Communist conservative of his time, regarded the character as sympathetic,
not a villain. The senator's gay affair, he wrote, was "purely personal
and harmed no one else." As the historian David K. Johnson observes in
"The Lavender Scare," his 2004 account of Washington's anti-gay witch hunts
during the cold war era, it's the gay-baiters in Drury's novel who "are the
unprincipled menace to the country, using every available tool for partisan
advantage." Preminger's movie takes the same stand (though the
preposterously stereotyped gay bar scene is the film's own invention).
That message remains on target now. But in the years since, even as it has
ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay,
unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement.
It's a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of
the anti-"activist" judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal
theory (they're for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida).
Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger
ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way
to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the
constitutional checks and balances that "Advise and Consent" so powerfully
extols.
Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se
that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the
courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people
since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont
legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school. The Southern
Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious
right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's, when
the Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant championed the overturning of an
anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla.,
and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly formed Moral Majority issued a "Declaration
of War" against homosexuality. A quarter-century later these views
remained so unreconstructed that Mr. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson would go
so far as to pin the 9/11 attacks in part on gay men and lesbians -- a charge
they later withdrew but that Mr. Robertson repositioned just two weeks ago.
In response to a question from George Stephanopoulos, he said he now believes
that activist judges are a more serious threat than Al Qaeda.
Their cronies are no different. As The Washington Post reported, Rick
Scarborough, the Texas preacher and Tom DeLay acolyte whose "Patriot Pastor"
network is a leading player in the judiciary battle, first became active in
politics in 1992, when he helped oust a local high-school principal for the
crime of presiding over an AIDS-awareness assembly. The American Family
Association, whose leader, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, is a Scarborough ally, had
been whipping up homophobia long before anyone suspected SpongeBob SquarePants
of being a stalking horse (or at least a stalking sea sponge) for same-sex
marriage. So-called research available on the Wildmon Web site for years
-- and still there as of last week -- asserts that 17 percent of gay men "report
eating and/or rubbing themselves with the feces of their partners" and 15
percent "report sex with animals."
Which judges do these people admire? Their patron saint is the former
Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, best known for his activism in displaying
the Ten Commandments; in a ruling against a lesbian mother in a custody case,
Mr. Moore deemed homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against
nature" and suggested that the state had the power to prohibit homosexual
"conduct" with penalties including "confinement and even execution."
Another hero is William H. Pryor Jr., the former Alabama attorney general whose
nomination to the federal bench was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee
on Thursday. A Pryor brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Texas
anti-sodomy law argued that decriminalized gay sex would lead to legalized
necrophilia, bestiality and child pornography. It was Justice Anthony
Kennedy's eloquent dismissal of such vitriol in his 2003 majority opinion
striking down the Texas statute that has since made him the right's No. 1
judicial piñata.
What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued
emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been
incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay
themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war.
Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action
Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that
said, "Our nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual
movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are
lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS
in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in
Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the
electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the
minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding
and treatment in 1995.
But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful
Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by
the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West's long, successful
political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and
lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny
City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education.
The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying
to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing
boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy
Cohn of "Angels in America" -- who describes himself as "a heterosexual man" who
has sex "with guys" -- Mr. West has said he had "relations with adult men" but
doesn't "characterize" himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy -- it's
pathology.
ALLEN Drury might not have known what to make of Mr. West or of another odd tic
in the 30-year war, the recurrent emergence of gay-baiting ideologues with
openly gay children (Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Alan Keyes).
According to Mr. Johnson's fresh scholarship in "The Lavender Scare," a likely
inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury's "Advise and Consent" was the
real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his
Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make
an issue of his gay son's arrest in Lafayette Park on "morals charges."
Those were the dark ages, but it isn't entirely progress that we now have a
wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster,
cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly
bereft of moral bearings as James West. Check out the good old days in
"Advise and Consent," not to mention Charles Laughton's valedictory performance
as a Bible Belt senator who ultimately puts patriotism over partisanship, and
weep.
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