In the prologue to his 1992 memoir Coming Out Conservative, the late political activist Marvin Liebman recounts an experience that all gay people face. One of the most important organizational brains behind the conservative movement (he was a founder of both Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union), Liebman was spending the 1976 Thanksgiving weekend at the Connecticut home of his close friends William and Pat Buckley. Joining them was Ronald Reagan, who earlier that year had conceded his primary campaign for president to Gerald Ford, along with his wife, Nancy, and son, Ron. With Buckley, Liebman, and Reagan, assembled in the kitchen that evening was the nation’s conservative brain trust.
Over a nightcap and out of the hearing of the wives and children, Reagan expressed his concern that Ron, a student at Yale, had taken up ballet dancing. “I haven’t told Nancy yet, but young Ron has told me he’s going to quit Yale and become a … ballet dancer. Now I don’t care what the kid does as long as it’s legal and makes him happy, but …” Turning to Liebman, Reagan asked, “But aren’t dancers … aren’t dancers sort of… funny?”
Enduring an ignorant or bigoted statement about homosexuality—and Reagan’s naive search for a polite way to insinuate homosexuality was certainly more the former than the latter—is something that every gay person experiences at some point in their life. How they respond is determined by several factors, not the least of which are the assertiveness of the individual and how comfortable they are acknnowledging their homosexuality. Liebman, who was deeply closeted at the time and would not come out publicly until nearly fifteen years after this incident, tried to answer in as straightforward and discreet a way as possible. “I told him that some ballet dancers were ‘funny,’ of course, but that many were not,” Liebman recalled, before reassuring the future president that Mikhail Baryshnikov “was one of the sex idols of our time, immensely attractive to women.”
Numerous studies have shown, and common sense suggests, that people who know a gay person personally are more accepting of homosexuality and supportive of the panoply of concerns called “gay rights” than those who do not. Reagan had many gay friends from his time in Hollywood (Rock Hudson, most famously, among them), and Nancy, like many women of her station and glamour, could call upon a vast array of confirmed bachelors as “walkers.” As for Liebman’s secret, Reagan “must certainly have known,” but neither man was prepared to discuss it. “Denial can be a peaceful form of retreat,” Liebman wrote, an observation that described its author as much as it did the insurgent conservative political star.
If hearing the veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) homophobic slight is universal to the gay experience, it is something that gay conservatives, especially those in the fields of media and politics, must deal with on a more profound basis. For being gay is not unlike being conservative, in that both, I believe, are an expression of an individual’s most basic humanity. To be sure, one’s political viewpoints can and almost always do evolve, in a way that one’s sexuality does not (as someone who canvassed for Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, I can easily attest to this phenomenon). But for those of us right-of-center gay people who take politics seriously and see it as the expression of deeply felt values, arguing on behalf of causes in which we genuinely don’t believe would be like trying to make love to someone of the opposite gender. In this sense, politics is very much about human nature.
Reading Liebman’s memoir evoked a similar encounter I had with a prominent conservative writer while I was a senior in college. Like Liebman, I had begun making something of a name for myself in right-of-center circles with my columns in the Yale Daily News, and I found myself one evening at a gathering of prominent conservatives in New York City. Talking with a well-known conservative writer about Islamic Jihadism, I noted the hypocrisy of some European Leftists who claimed to believe in gay rights yet had no problem forming political alliances with Muslim reactionaries who backed harsh penalties, even violent ones, for homosexuality. What united these strange bedfellows, I observed, was a shared hatred of America and capitalism. Not a particularly original thought, but one to which conservatives, most of whom didn’t much care for gay rights, were not attuned.
Expecting to earn confirmation for my detecting this most basic, and really quite heinous example of liberal insincerity, I was taken aback when my interlocutor told me that he was actually “sympathetic” to much of what Islamists had to say about homosexuality. Indeed, it wasn’t their views on homosexuality that bothered him, but rather their militant opposition to America and its overseas interests that put them beyond the pale.
Now, unlike Marvin Liebman at the point of his conservative kitchen-cabinet anecdote, I was long (well, three years) out of the closet, had written numerous articles in which I discussed my own homosexuality (including articles for the gay press), and readily assumed that most people familiar with my work—as this individual certainly was—knew I was gay. But whether he actually did or not matters only in the judgment of just how hostile was his response.
Aghast at what I had heard, I took another gulp of my drink and said nothing. I knew that there was plenty of antigay sentiment in the conservative world—this was only two years after the unsuccessful attempt to insert an amendment into the United States Constitution, banning gay marriage—but I did not expect to confront it at so prestigious a gathering. So naked, not to mention extreme, an expression of homophobia was something one heard at assemblies of the Christian Coalition or fringe groups exclusively devoted to rolling back the political progress gays had made, not in the refined precincts of intellectual conservatism into which I was readily ascending. When the writer—who, up until that point, was a significant influence on my own work (I have rarely read him in the years since)—walked away, all I could do was complain to a straight female friend, the only other witness to the exchange. But my sense of confused anger was only compounded when, later that evening, the main speaker took a tangential swipe at gays “making a mockery of marriage.”
Looking back on this episode, I can confidently say that were I to find myself in a similar situation today (and, much to my surprise, I have not, which in its own small way says much about the progress that the country, and the conservative movement especially, has made in an incredibly short period of time), I would not react in the cowardly way in which I did. As Liebman wrote of his sixty-seven years as a closeted homosexual, I regretted my “compliant silence” in the face of such an illiberal sentiment, which was in its own, momentary way a form of being in the “closet.”
The private, offhand remarks of individuals are one thing. The public policy positions of a movement or political party are another. And while I’ve largely avoided personalized homophobia in my relatively short time associating with conservatives, that does not mean that the conservative movement is devoid of it. My positive experience is attributable to several factors, among them the fact that most people are averse to confrontation, and even those who consider homosexuality anathema are unlikely to say something rude to someone they know to be gay. It may also be due to the fact that many of my conservative friends and acquaintances are libertarian, taking the view that the government should adopt no position whatsoever when it comes to homosexuality. I also have not traveled extensively to the red-state American heartland, where the base of the Republican Party comes from and where views about homosexuality are more retrograde than those held by the intellectual conservatives of New York and Washington.
Whatever the negative views that some conservatives hold about gay people, I have certainly received more vitriol from Leftists for my right-of-center opinions. I believe the source of this anger is the same that drives so many people on the Left to vilify black and female conservatives. The Left views gays, like ethnic minorities and women, not as individuals but as part of an oppressed group. And because the Left (at least in word) supports gay rights, it is therefore the duty of each and every homosexual to sign up with the checklist of liberal policies. Indeed, a gay (or black or Latino) person who does not adopt a Left-wing worldview is showing the worst form of ingratitude, as we “owe” the Left for any of the rights that we enjoy.
It may sound paradoxical, but the “gay agenda” today is fundamentally conservative. Neither gay activists nor movement conservatives will be happy to admit this, but it is inescapable. Those in the conservative movement most resistant to making peace with the main criteria of this agenda—the extension of civil marriage rights to homosexuals, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to adopt children, and the acceptance of homosexuality itself as a benign, naturally occurring quality of the human race—continue to think of the gay rights movement as it was in its heyday of the immediate post-Stonewall era. They see gay people as threats to the traditional American family structure and social order, which, to be perfectly fair, most of the prominent gay activists of the mid-twentieth century were. They had no interest in monogamous marriage, which they viewed as patriarchic and misogynistic.
But today, there are no calls for free love and the right to keep bathhouses open. The young gay activists protesting in the streets of California do so in order to get married. They want to join this bedrock institution, not tear it apart. In this, they are assuming the mantle of those who took part in the 1969 Stonewall riots, which were sparked when a gay bar’s patrons refused to continue enduring harassment at the hands of New York City Police Department. Though considered part of the counterculture, which in most respects it certainly was, the modern gay rights movement was galvanized by calls to one of the most basic constitutional principles: freedom of association.
The same goes for service in the military. In the 1960s and 1970s, gay activists were rooting for Vietcong victory and voyaging to Cuba to help realize Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution. Today, a major demand of the country’s most prominent gay groups is the right to join the United States military so as to strengthen the caliber of the armed forces. Such positions would be unimaginable to many of the gay activists of the early years, who, with some notable exceptions, were down-the-line hard-Leftists.
As for the condition of same-sex attraction itself, the belief that it is unchangeable and determined either in the womb or not long after birth returns our understanding of homosexuality to the place where it belongs: science. This naturalistic explanation of homosexuality is at odds with the claims of Left-wing “queer” theorists, who argue that binary sexuality is a social construct, something forced upon us by a conservative society adhering to strict definitions of gender roles, and that homosexuality is “performative.” On this, the reactionaries and radicals oddly agree. But homosexuality is no more a choice than is the color of one’s skin or eyes. A rational society finds a way to deal with it in a humane and productive way, not pretend it doesn’t exist.
It is for these reasons that I see no conflict whatsoever in the tenets of conservatism and a “progressive” understanding of homosexuality, nor in being a gay conservative. It is, rather, certain critical constituencies within the conservative movement that have made the designation so difficult for many to comprehend, and perhaps harder for its designees to bear. But there is nothing inherently oxymoronic in a gay conservative. There is no reason why one’s sexual and romantic attraction to members of the same sex should render one predisposed to a Left-wing view about the power of public employees’ unions, or late-term abortion, or affirmative action. Indeed, one could even argue, and some gay conservatives have, that on the latter two questions, being gay informs a right-of-center disposition. What will the gay rights establishment have to say about abortion if medical advancements bring about the ability to discern a gay gene in fetuses? And while the prospect of employment and admissions preferences for sexual minorities may today seem like a wild idea (though not really so wild, given the Left-wing tilt of contemporary academia), does a realistic survey of affirmative action and the resentment it has caused on the campus and in the workplace instill optimism for those who wish to see gay people fully integrated in society?
After the crushing blow of AIDS and the maturation of the first sexually liberated generation of gays, it was only a matter of time that a new, more nuanced, gay politics would emerge. In the 1990s, a small group of right-of-center writers and thinkers—most prominently, Bruce Bawer, Jonathan Rauch, and Andrew Sullivan—began positing some ideas that many in the gay commentariat and intelligentsia considered heretical. The purpose of their intellectual campaign was to both integrate gay people into mainstream American society and make room in mainstream American society for gay people’s integration, to give gay people “a place at the table” (the title of Bawer’s path-breaking book on the subject).
But these writers, while vilified by the activist gay Left and most of the Right (which patronized them for their earnest but ultimately fruitless efforts to seek acceptance), did not so much create a gay conservatism as express the viewpoints of a silent majority. It’s true that the most visible aspects of gay culture up until the 1980s had been those of hedonism, frivolity, and promiscuity. And in the minds of most straight people, this is what it meant to be gay. But there was, and always has been, a great mass of gay people who live lives no different from their straight peers. And there is no reason for them to be more Left-wing in their political orientation other than that they are members of a long-persecuted class. As gay life becomes more bourgeois and the legal restrictions gay people face are gradually lifted, the justifications for gay radicalism will disappear just as the reasons for gay conservatism will multiply.
Rather, it is the geographic structure of the contemporary American conservative movement, so dependent upon the votes of religious conservatives (particularly evangelical Christians in the South), which makes so many gay people and their straight allies view the Republican Party with hostility. It was the religious Right, imbued with an undeniable hostility to gay people, which gave the conservative movement political power. Today, the GOP base remains opposed to gay marriage, but while the occasional Republican politician may utter an ignorant remark here or there about homosexuality, antigay animus is slowly dissipating. It does not, for example, appear to have any place in the Tea Party movement sweeping the country. At the 2008 Republican National Convention, 49 percent of the delegates supported civil unions or marriage for gays, a number that will likely increase every four years as the delegate pool becomes younger, itself a reflection of the remarkable generational shift that has occurred in the past decade on the issues surrounding homosexuality.
Though he would renounce the term (if not the philosophical holds) of conservatism just five years later, Marvin Liebman was onto something in his 1990 “coming out” letter to William F. Buckley Jr., published in the pages of National Review. “The conservative view,” he declared, “based as it is on the inherent rights of the individual over the state, is the logical political home of gay men and women.” The majority of gay people would find this claim baffling. But rest assured the day is coming when they will not.