It is estimated by the professionals in the field of alcoholism that as many as one in four homosexuals is an alcoholic. Alcohol plays a pivotal role in the gay lifestyle, whether the homosexual is "out of the closet" or a member of "the invisible society," whether the homosexual is comfortable with his or her sexual identity or not.
Because of the hostile reaction of the general population toward homosexuality, gays tend to feel more comfortable in their own bars or at private home parties. Alcohol is very much a part of both scenes.
Some homosexuals are so tortured by their homosexuality that they isolate themselves totally from everyone. In this case alcohol eases the negative feelings about self and passes the time. Many of these alcoholics only place themselves in a position "to be discovered" after drinking.
The homosexual alcoholic must deal with the twin stigmas of alcoholism and homosexuality, and the alcoholic homosexual is faced with a need for accepting both.
As Robert Bauman points out, "God loves all His children. No matter what they're like, He made them in his image."
Robert Bauman is an alcoholic. He is a former three-term U.S. congressman from Maryland and is now in the private practice of law.
The last time I had a drink was on May 1, 1980.
I think my alcoholism definitely had to do with my inability to cope with my personal circumstances. Perhaps the central problem I faced was that I was a man who had been married, at that point, for seventeen or eighteen years, had four children, was Catholic, and was incapable of dealing with my sexuality. One of the driving forces behind my drinking was a desire to escape from all of this. I did not drink to inspire myself to do things in a grandiose way. I didn't need a drink to go out and make a speech. I'd made speeches all my life. I didn't need a drink to get through the day. I drank to escape. I drank for relief from the realities of my life. I drank, in one sense, to muster up courage. My pattern was to drink and then go out and embroil myself in some kind of sexual escapade. Drinking was not facing reality. I wanted to be unconscious of what was happening to my life. The bottle was the easiest way out.
The incidence of alcoholism in gay people is much, much higher than in the general populace. Often the two go hand in hand. My guess is that if you are gay, with all the problems that presents, many times it leads into drinking as a way out. This is the Catch-22 for gays because the major social forum for gays in this country, at least in the last ten to fifteen years, has been the bars and other places to drink. At the bar you immediately order a drink, two drinks, three drinks. The principal meeting places enhance the possibility of alcoholism. If you have the tendency toward alcoholism, whatever the source of that tendency—genetic, environmental, behavioral—and you can argue over that—if you have the tendency and you are into cruising and bars in the gay community, you're set up. You are an accident waiting to happen.
On the other hand, if you're home isolated and unable to express your feelings toward other people and you're all bottled up, that's a good reason to uncork the bottle. And a lot of people do that too.
My father was an alcoholic. I cannot argue in favor of any genetic connection in my case, though, because I was an adopted child. He was alcoholic enough that he eventually associated himself with organizations that sobered him up, and the last three to four years of his life he was dry. He had to be because his alcoholism affected his work and his family situation.
When I was a small child, I recall, particularly at holiday times, my father would get smashed. He was then an accomplished musician, well placed in dance orchestras in the East. Inevitably, he would have to have a series of Christmas parties for the band. He was a home movie buff in the thirties and forties and fifties, so I can watch myself grow up on 16-millimeter film. A lot of these films were taken at his parties, and Dad was always smashed. There he is on film, crocked. And there I am, little Bobby, two, three, four, five years old, being handed a little shot glass of beer. That was my reward for coming down in the middle of the night when these parties got loud and I woke up.
At some point in my childhood I purposely and consciously formed a decision not to drink, because of my father's problem. He wasn't violent. He didn't beat me. He got angry sometimes and he'd hit me when he was drunk, but he wasn't a father who constantly beat me when he was drunk. He only did that if he was really angry. He would more likely fall asleep. When he was sober, he didn't seem interested in me. When he was drunk, he was only interested up to the point where he was angry, and then he'd sort of drift out of it and go to sleep, so I can't complain of child abuse.
I came to the opinion that I wasn't going to drink at an early age. And I did not drink until I was nineteen or twenty years old and in college. I scrupulously avoided it, even when all of my peers in high school were drinking beer. I just didn't. Anytime the occasion would arise, I would say to myself, I don't want to start now.
I started drinking beer in college simply because it was the thing to do. At some point, I convinced myself that drinking beer as a small child never really affected me that much. Dad always drank hard stuff, so I thought maybe beer could be all right. So beer was my only drink. I would tell myself that the other stuff was dangerous, but beer wasn't.
From 1960, when I was married, I started drinking wine—I guess I was about twenty-two or twenty-three. My wife liked wine. In fact, our first date was the first time I'd ever had a glass of wine, white wine. I developed a taste for that. And now and then I'd get drunk. It really didn't become a problem until the early 1970s, after I had been elected to public office. My pattern was not to drink in public unless it was an obligatory glass or two at meals or at a social function.
When all my difficulties happened in 1980, most people didn't believe I was an alcoholic because almost nobody had ever seen me publicly drunk. In those last years, I started having one or two bourbons before going to a party so I'd be ahead of everybody before I got there. That's a sure sign of alcoholism. In that same period, I would usually drink at home on weekends, when I was away from the public, particularly if I had no functions to go to. The pattern was there. Eventually I started drinking midday, though on week nights I'd always wait until after five. I'd get home and have a drink immediately.
Toward the end, I remember once waking up lying on my back, looking up at the library ceiling in my house and not knowing why I was there. Dawn was coming up. I vaguely remembered we'd had a dinner party the night before. We'd had guests, and the last thing I remembered was pouring another round. It was a partial blackout because I didn't remember the rest of the evening. I went upstairs to bed with the worst headache that morning and I didn't get up until two in the afternoon. Our guests had stayed overnight, and I was barely able to get up to say good-bye to them.
My wife would often say to me, "Bob, don't you think you've had enough? Aren't you drinking too much?" or "Let me drive." One night I fought with her. I decided I was going to drive an hour and half back home from a function. I insisted. I had the kind of personality, particularly when drinking, that would get sort of nasty. "I'll do it," I insisted. "I'm going to drive."
At the end, in the winter of 1979-80, it was not unusual for me to leave the House floor, go to my office to sign mail, answer phone calls, and call people back for an hour. It might be eight o'clock or eight-thirty at night when I was through. Then I would have a drink in the office, maybe two. Not big ones, but drinks. After that I'd go to a restaurant with some staff members from the Rules Committee, on which I served, or my own staff. We'd go to a restaurant on Capitol Hill, the Monocle, a watering hole. I would have had two drinks in the office, a couple of double vodka martinis, maybe three, before dinner. I'd help two or three people polish off a bottle of wine during the meal. After the meal, I'd have two or three Irish coffees, then three or four stingers. In the space of two hours I would have consumed all of this alcohol. Then I would get into my own car, sometimes shucking my staff aide who wanted to drive me, and go to a bar and continue drinking. I was doing that one night a week, but it got to be two nights a week, and sometimes three.
Many of the difficulties that came out in the press in 1980 happened when I'd had a full head of booze. I was driving through red lights. I couldn't get out of parking lots. One night, driving home by myself, I ran up on the guardrail. The police officer who responded was someone who knew me and "helped" me by not exposing me. I hadn't injured anybody, though the guardrail was sort of smashed up, and the car had two thousand dollars' worth of damage. It was towed away, and I was taken home in a police car. Now if someone had had me charged with what I should have been charged with, I might have avoided a lot of things that happened later. But that's a might-have-been.
There were a number of times when, having gotten totally boozed up, I would go out to gay bars. I didn't go there very often, but a known member of Congress with congressional license plates doesn't have to go drunk to a gay bar very often—just a few times will be noticed.
I didn't live in Washington. My home was eighty-five miles away from there. Too often, I was getting home at three or four A.M. and getting up at seven A.M. to be back in Washington at nine. Like a lot of other alcoholics, I seemed to have developed an amazing capacity to drink and the stamina to carry this off. I could get up the next morning with a hell of a headache and, by the time I had to be on the floor of the House, I would have shaken it enough to negotiate the rest of the day.
As I've said, I didn't do this every night. And there were periods during those last few years when I would stop drinking for two or three weeks. Another indication of being an alcoholic is that you can stop any time you want to. I went thirty days one time. Then I'd go right back. I couldn't stay stopped.
There was no specific incident that sparked the investigation, but the authorities became interested in me for some reason. I personally feel that there was some political connotation, because the investigation was going on for eight months to a year before I knew it was happening. And it was not revealed until four to five weeks before my 1980 election. There were all kinds of reasons given to justify the investigation. They thought I was a security risk, although there was never any indication that I was revealing information. Once, years ago, a KGB agent from the Russian embassy staff approached me. He wanted to talk conservative politics. I immediately called the FBI. They said, "Talk to him," and afterward they debriefed me. So security wasn't it.
But I had been to a particular gay bar enough times that my name came up in the course of some other police investigation, and a young man who was involved—apparently in an attempt to ameliorate his own circumstance—said, "Hey, I know a congressman," or "My roommate knows a congressman and in exchange for that information could you go light on me?" This was in the press, so I assume there was some validity to it. The FBI approached me in September, six weeks before the election, and said, "Here is what we have." I told them that those events never happened. The U.S. attorney gave my lawyer to understand that they would convene a grand jury and indict me for all of these things, which is the standard practice, whether they could prove them or not; but if I would plead not guilty as a first offender to a charge of solicitation, which is a misdemeanor, then trial and these charges, I stupidly thought, would all be forgotten.
I thought I wouldn't get nearly the publicity by simply pleading not guilty, so that's the course I chose. I was foolish because I was thinking in terms of holding down the political damage. I should have known that because of my position in Congress and the conservative movement, my outspokenness—all those things—it didn't matter what I got into court for, it was going to be notorious. As it turned out, the memos that the U.S. attorney's office processed and the FBI investigative report were both handed to the press. When I went into court, the Washington Post had the FBI investigative report. I've never seen it. I tried to get it afterward, but they wouldn't give it to me. So there was no specific incident. It was just my showing up in these gay bars, drinking, making contacts with young men—who, by the way, were adults in the District of Columbia. I was never arrested. I was never dragged into a police station. Nothing like that.
What did happen was that there were situations in which I was involved, always while drinking. I had to get a full head of steam to do these crazy, asinine things. No one in his right mind—and alcoholics are insane in their conduct sometimes—would have done as blatantly and openly what I did as a prominent political figure in Washington.
Of course, a lot of armchair psychiatrists said afterward, "He wanted to be caught." And in a strange way, I think I did. Life had become too much for me. I was overpowered by a lot of things in my life and this was my way of crying for help, of saying, "Do something. I can't. I can't stop drinking. I can't stop doing what I'm doing. Help!" I chose a very dramatic way, a very destructive way to do it.
I wound up with 48.2 percent of the vote in 1980, in a very conservative district, four weeks from the day all this became public. In losing, I also got ninety-one thousand votes, which was nine thousand more than I'd ever gotten when I won. There was a lot of tolerance, a lot of broadmindedness, a lot of support in my district, and I'll always appreciate that.
I had been confronted by my wife in January of 1980, nine months before the election. I took my last drink on May 1. Between January and May, well before the public knew anything, and before I knew about the investigation, I went to my family priest, Father John Harvey, who had been a friend of my wife. I had known him for twenty years. Coincidentally, he is one of the foremost Catholic experts on the subject of homosexuality in the United States.
Carol said she found some gay literature on the seat of my car. It wasn't the first time, and she said, "This can't go on. You must do something. I want you to go see Father Harvey." I called him. I knew Carol well enough, after all of our years together, to know that she meant what she said. I went to see Father Harvey. We met in the House restaurant. Just think of the other people sitting there who could have overheard this conversation. It would have been a lulu for the gossip columnists the next day. This little Irish priest and the Watchdog of the House, as they called me. He just pried the gay aspects out of me, and I also described my drinking. He said, "It seems to me that what's happening there always starts with your drinking. You start out by getting drunk, and then the other things flow from that." Then he said, "I want you to go to see a friend of mine." He recommended a clinical psychologist in the D.C. area, Dr. John Kinnane, who specializes in alcoholism and also in homosexuality problems.
I saw Dr. Kinnane in February, March, and April, and it took him the better part of ninety days to convince me that I was an alcoholic. We didn't get to the gay business. We skirted around that. We talked about it, but I was convinced I wasn't gay, that it was a tendency that had to be dealt with but it wasn't major. I just couldn't face being gay. It was too horrible to talk about. He strongly recommended that I go to organizations that help alcoholics, and he recommended some in the Washington area. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to be seen at a group where alcoholics gathered because I wasn't an alcoholic. It was a terrible blow to my pride to think that I couldn't control myself, that there was anything in my life that I couldn't deal with reasonably and logically and overcome. I could save the world on the floor of Congress. I could save the United States. I had policies for everything. My ego was enormous. I walked all over people who got in my way. To be told that I couldn't pick up a glass of wine and drink it, that was the thing that hit me. One day I said to Dr. Kinnane, "You mean I can never have another glass of white wine over a good piece of fish with my wife at dinner?" And he said, "Never. You can never have another drink. You're an alcoholic. That's my opinion. You are going to have to decide for yourself. No more white wine. No more nothing."
I tried to taper off. I drank only white wine or beer for a while. I did away with the vodka. Then, one last time, on May i, 1980, I really did it up raw. I drank and drank and wound up in a D.C. hotel. I blacked out. I had lost my car and I woke up the next morning in a place I didn't even know. Fortunately, I did remember that I had an appointment with Dr. Kinnane at eleven. I had the card in my pocket. I found it.
I went to Dr. Kinnane's office; he took one look at me and said, "My God, what's happened to you?" I looked like death warmed over. He picked up the phone and called Wilbur Mills. He took me to a meeting of an organization that helps in these situations. I was deathly afraid that someone was going to recognize me. As soon as I walked in the door, someone, a former member of Congress, did recognize me. I said, "Gee, I didn't know you had this problem." He said, "Yeah, it cost me the U.S. Senate seat. It's good to see you here. If you need help, this is the place to come." Wilbur squired me to a number of meetings until he felt that I was strong enough to keep going on my own. I went about four, five days a week in Washington for the six months I was still in the House.
So before the world knew I had a problem, I had faced the problem to the extent that I could. I had stopped drinking cold turkey in May, and I really felt much better. It took thirty days to clear the system and the brain a little, and I was still going to Dr. Kinnane on a weekly or twice-weekly basis.
I think the thing that finally convinced me that I was an alcoholic was the fact that my life had become unmanageable. Dr. Kinnane kept pointing out to me, "Well, if you're not an alcoholic, why is your wife so upset about it? If you're not an alcoholic, why is your financial situation so terrible? You're a lawyer, you're a congressman, yet you're broke. Why are all these things happening to you, Bob, if you're not an alcoholic? What do you do when you get uptight about all these things that I have been mentioning? You take a drink, don't you? And then, what after? You take another and another." I couldn't hear that twice a week for an hour and not finally recognize that it was me he was talking about. That was what was happening to me. That had happened to me. It had already happened. It keeps going on. Every day it happens. I finally said to myself, "My God, I may well be an alcoholic. Look at the mess I've made. Look at the wreck I've made."
Once I stopped drinking and he dried me out, or I dried myself out, we started dealing with other things, I started to think in terms of the inner relations between my personal problems—my sexuality, the pressures of public life, my marriage, my children, and my alcoholism.
I thought things had improved at home. I think they had. For the first time, I was having to face things like, "How do we pay the mortgage next month?" Or, "What am I going to do about politics?" I found that for the first time in twenty years of marriage, I was talking to my wife. I couldn't avoid arguments by taking a few drinks, so we started talking more. I feel that up to a certain point, our relationship improved. I stopped going to gay bars. I stopped cruising. I was no longer doing the nightly drinking and dining that I described. I was coming home nights. After I'd leave the office, I'd be home in an hour and fifteen minutes. Things changed appreciably. But in early September, when I was confronted by the FBI privately, and then three weeks later in court, that placed a strain on things. The funny thing about it is, as relates to my alcoholism, I thought of taking a drink when all this hit. I also thought of suicide. But I said to myself, "I'm not going to do it." I had heard enough at meetings and in my psychological counseling that I just knew the worst crisis in your life wasn't the place where you needed a drink. It was a place where you needed not to drink. Besides, I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of jumping off a bridge or starting to drink again. I had just enough ego left, even though it was really getting battered around, that I said to myself, "I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to drink again." Afterward, my doctor said to me, "Boy, if you got through this without a drink, that ought to be damn good proof to you that you're not going to drink again." But alcoholics know that the possibility always exists.
I had been in counseling for about five months and I was two months dry. I was coming back from some social function, and I said to myself, "What would be my reaction now, two months after my drinking has ended, if I went to a gay bar?" I parked the car blocks away from the only gay bar I had been going to, and I went into the bar, just into the vestibule. I didn't stand there more than a minute or two, and I was terrified. I looked around and said, "What am I doing here? I'll be recognized. They'll know who I am." I wanted to see what my reaction would be. I was just curious "What would it be like if I went back in here sober? I've never been in here sober." I couldn't stay there. I turned and left. Got the hell out. Do you know, someone saw me there that night? Subsequently, when all the stories hit the press, they said, "Why, he was still going to gay bars in July this year." It's true; I went back one time for a matter of seconds and saw the squalor of the place, the dirty floor, the black painted walls, the people, what they looked like—though I'm not trying to put them down—and I said, "What am I doing here now? What was I ever doing here?"
Despite the fact that I have now accepted my homosexuality, rarely have I gone into a gay bar in D.C., and then usually with friends. I think I've been in such a bar twice within the last three years. (I have run into some interesting conservatives, liberals and congressmen there, too.) But that's twice I've done it, in all this time. It doesn't appeal to me.
By the summer of 1981, I was tending to the position that I had to face the sexuality issue as I had the alcoholism. The last straw was when Carol initiated proceedings in the Diocesan Tribunal to have our marriage annulled. That annulment came through in August. The Diocesan Tribunal, which deals with marriage, divorce, and annulment, judged that I'd had no capacity to contract the marriage originally because I had been a homosexual. So the marriage was annulled. It did not exist in the eyes of the church and never had. At that point, I said to myself, "Look, here I am going to a psychiatrist, trying to cure myself from being what the church decided I am and have been for twenty years. What am I trying to fight?" In many ways, it was a convenient, final capping off of things I had been thinking for an awfully long time. I just didn't want to accept it.
The horror of being gay is indeed worse than that of being an alcoholic. Alcoholism, not to take it lightly, has achieved a certain acceptance in this country in the sense that people now understand it better. It is known, although some people will never accept it. They'll always say that it is a moral weakness, or that you can stop if you want to. But being gay has never reached even that degree of acceptance or tolerance, and may not for many, many years, until people understand what being gay means, as they are now learning what being alcoholic means.
In a way Carol did me a favor because she forced me to face the realities of what was happening in my life. No psychiatrist ever tells you you are gay. They say, "Here are all the indicators. Here are all the facts as we have known them over the years, and this seems to be your pattern." Sooner or later, you have to draw some conclusions.
Until I stopped drinking my mind wasn't clear enough to deal with anything else. There is no way that I could have continued to drink and address my homosexuality in therapy. Drinking was a way to escape from all of that, not face it, not deal with it. It was a double denial because I was denying them both. Then I accepted my alcoholism. My mind cleared up, and then I accepted my being gay.
Gay alcoholics have an even more acute and deeper need for help. Seek help for your alcoholism immediately so that you can recognize the dimensions of your sexuality for what it is. If indeed you are gay, accept that for what it is and deal with it. I don't advocate immoral acts. I don't advocate any particular lifestyle. I don't advocate that you leave your church or denounce morality. Chances are that if you are a homosexual it's not a matter of choice, it is something innate in your nature. It's formed in your earliest years, perhaps by birth. You should deal with it.
In our society, instead of dealing with it we are taught to hide it, to be ashamed of it, to consider ourselves to be less than human beings, to be some sort of monster. Your entire life is colored in millions of subtle and not so subtle ways to think that you're not human, that you're less than human because you're gay. It could be that you find that you're not gay. If you display the pattern of conduct that I did, you may be gay. But that's not so terrible. God loves all His children. No matter what they're like, He made them in His image.
Don't run away from the homosexual feelings by drinking. That is the classic avenue for many gays. I'm active in organizations where a lot of people who are both alcoholic and gay seek help. When you listen to the stories, the repetition of themes is there: denial, poor self-image, very little self-esteem, family members who beat them down, parents who are alcoholic. The whole thing is repeated over and over almost as many times as you run into people who are gay and alcoholic. You hear of so many people in gay circles who die in auto accidents, drink themselves to death—cirrhosis of the liver, hepatitis, physically run down by drinking or using other drugs. You'll find an awful lot of other drugs, too. I don't think this happens because gays are involved in the drug culture more than the general public. It's because they can't deal with themselves as they are. They are taught not to. They're taught to deny themselves. If you go through your entire life denying who you are and what you are, it colors every waking moment of your life. You are trying to be something that you aren't. My God, it's an awful burden to carry.
What I am advocating is don't drink. The last place you should go for help if you think you're gay is a bar. The first place you should go, particularly if you're having a drinking problem, is to an organization like Gay AA or a counseling service that some gay groups offer. There are a lot of those listed now. Deal with what I called in my public statement the twin compulsions of alcoholism and homosexuality. They were indeed compulsions in my life. They're not compulsions anymore. I'm an alcoholic and I don't drink. So at least I'm recovering. As far as being gay, that's the way I am. If I had to do it over and had some control over it, I think I'd choose not to be gay, simply because of the way our society treats gays. It's not the easiest thing in the world. I wouldn't want my children to suffer through what I did. But, on the other hand, if you are gay, accept it. Deal with it and live out your life.