Coming out Right

Marvin Liebman is worried, and when he's worried, you should be.

Who is Marvin Liebman? He is one of the major architects of the conservative revolution that has dominated the American agenda for the past decade. Liebman, 67, helped found the American Conservative Union back in the Sixties and pushed Ronald Reagan for President as early as the 1968 Miami convention. He was the toughest of Cold Warriors, fighting to save China, Katanga and Vietnam from the Communist enemy. But now that the Cold War is over and conservative wrath has switched from Red baiting to gay baiting, he has a problem. He is the enemy. Liebman, who had been one of a considerable number of Washington-based closet-gay conservatives, decided to "come out" because of his horror over the runaway bigotry in conservative ranks.

As he recently told readers of the National Review, the conservative bible, "I worry that the right wing, having won the Cold War and, for all intents and purposes, the battle over economic policy, will return to the fever swamps. I see evidence of this. It disturbs me greatly." He sounded this alarm in an open letter to "my best friend" of almost 35 years, National Review editor and leading conservative guru, William F. Buckley, Jr., revealing that "all the time I labored in the conservative vineyard, I was gay."

Not the biggest shocker, perhaps, but remember, this guy cofounded, with Buckley, the Young Americans for Freedom, whose current chant, according to Liebman, is "No rights for sodomites."

As to why he had "chosen this moment to go public with that part of my life that had been so private for all these years," Liebman wrote to Buckley that it was "because I fear that our cause might sink back into the ooze in which so much of it rested in pre-N.R. days. In that dark age, the American right was heavily, perhaps dominantly, made up of bigots: anti-Semites, anti-Catholics, the K.K.K., rednecks, Know-Nothings, a sorry lot of public hucksters and religious medicine men."

Liebman has cause to be concerned. Gay bashing, long an American blood sport, has now become the mainstay of right-wing fund-raising and publicly generated hysteria. The bullying appropriation of "family values," while often focusing on women's rights to abortion and other manifestations of sex outside of procreation, is never quite satiated until a homosexual connection is established. Witness Senator Jesse Helms's obsession with the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, which led to the exclusion of homoerotic art from NEA grants.

Homophobia has clearly emerged as the last refuge of American scoundrels. And what is involved here is nothing less than a fundamental split in conservative ideology that was papered over during the Cold War years but can no longer be concealed. There are two kinds of conservatives and they cannot sleep comfortably in the same bed.

Some conservatives are libertarians who simply want to cut back on Governmental intrusion into our economic and social lives. Theoretically, they should be strong supporters of civil liberties, including those of gays. As Liebman puts it, "The conservative view, based as it is on the inherent rights of the individual over the state, is the logical political home of gay men and women."

But the other kind of conservative desires precisely the opposite. In the name of "traditional values," this group seeks a great deal of Government intrusion into private lives and would trample on the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, as well as on freedom of speech. Freedom is to be permitted in the arts and in the market place only as long as minority taste does not offend the sacred mores of the majority. As Buckley put it, in his response to Liebman, "But you, too, must realize what are the implications of what you ask. Namely, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is allied with, no less, one way of life, become indifferent to another way of life."

Buckley is being slippery here, for the issue is not that of homosexuality, or pro-choice birth control or the right of artists to tender their own moral values. Let Buckley believe as fervently as he might in his and his Church's notion of heaven and hell and let him espouse such notions vigorously; they should, however, not be backed by Government power.

It was one thing for Buckley to call Gore Vidal a "queer" on national television, as he did once when he found himself on the losing side of a debate. Vidal had called Buckley a Nazi and Buckley responded with the epithet, implying that one who practices homosexuality is on a moral plane with the murderers of tens of millions. No matter: Buckley's bigotry should be constitutionally protected as long as it is an idea and doesn't have the power of a mob or the law backing it up. But to call, as Buckley did subsequently, for all HIV-positive males to have their status tattooed on their buttocks—a suggestion for public policy—is to cross the line from individual bigotry into, yes, statist fascism.

Buckley must decide, as a point of logic that he so ardently espouses, whether he is in the camp of the libertarians or of the Helmses. The attempt to find a middle ground involves one inescapably in a hopeless contradiction. For libertarian conservatives—and as a matter of self-preservation, that category should include the large number of gay conservatives in the higher reaches of Washington power—the continued accommodation of the traditionalists is a death knell. They will accommodate their own demise.

Recall the sad case of former Congressman Robert E. Bauman, who preceded Liebman out of the closet. With Liebman, he founded the American Conservative Union and at the time the FBI charged him with soliciting for sex in a gay bar was its national chairman.

Congressman Bauman had survived as a conservative leader by endorsing without embarrassment all kinds of gay-bashing positions while he remained in the closet. He began public service as a Maryland legislator who picked up sailors on the q.t. but nonetheless worked to kill legislation preventing discrimination against homosexuals in housing. In 1977, Bauman, while continuing a 17-year pattern of cheating on his wife in random homosexual encounters, cosponsored the Family Protection Act. He would later admit that he had not bothered to read the fine print on this radical (concluded on page 192)Coming out Right(continued from page 55) legislation, which he now concedes would have "allowed overt discrimination against gays and lesbians based on their sexuality, sanctioning Government-protected exclusion of gay people from employment, housing and oilier areas." Although he has since modified his position and favors a broad view of civil liberties, while in the closet, he was, by his own recounting, a sell-hating censor. He wrote to one constituent, "I certainly share your support for civil rights.... At the same time, I cannot support legislation that would guarantee jobs to citizens who were denied these jobs by other citizens believing that homosexuality is a perversion of nature. I subscribe to this view. I would not want my children taught or influenced by gay people if this could be avoided...."

Two months before FBI agents visited his Capitol Hill office to inform him that they suspected him of committing felonies by transporting men within the District of Columbia For homosexualsex, Bauman had nominated no less a homophobe than Jesse Helms lo be Vice-President of the United States.

Yet in his book, The Gentleman from Maryland, subtitled "The Conscience of a Gay Conservative," Bauman, like Liebman, argues that he had no choice in becoming a homosexual and does not suggest that any other homosexual, teacher or casual acquaintance, ever lured him into this practice.

Indeed, the cases of Bauman and Liebman, along with those of thousands of other conservative gays in the Federal Government, suggest that being homosexual is no indicator of performance in life—until the Government goes poking its nose where it has no business. Banman was considered one of the hardest-working, brightest and most effective conservative Congressmen until caught in that sleazy Washington bar. Liebman was serving faithfully in the U.S. Army until his commanding officer read a letter he had written home that included some campy references and thundered, "Are you a Jew faggot?" Liebman said, "I guess I am" and received a general discharge.

Bauman and Liebman were not alone as gays advancing a conservative movement that seemed to delight in making life miserable for homosexuals. In his book, Bauman states, "The closets of Washington are full of gay Republicans and gay conservatives. Many of them serve in high Reagan Administration posts, some in the White House. They serve in the Congress and populate the circles of power that exist in law firms, public-relations firms, lobbying groups, political-action committees, even conservative organizations and the Republican Party structure as well."

One such powerful conservative was Terry Dolan, the cofounder of NCPAC, the leading conservative fund-raising organization, who died of AIDS in 1986. While known to many of his associates to be gay, he never publicly acknowledged this. Upon his death, his brother Anthony, Reagan's chief speechwriter, wrote a tortured two-page ad that he placed in The Washington Times, insisting that Terry's personal life be deemed private and left alone by the media. A fine position, except that what makes the plight of conservative gays so awful is that their dominant conservative ideology will not brook leaving their—or anyone else's—private lives alone.

In an interview with the gay magazine The Advocate, Liebman exhorts other gays to join him in the land of the conservatives: "Give the Republican Party a chance. Move in on them. Shake them up. If they won't be shaken, leave them. But don't leave the field to the enemy. With the Democratic Party, the liberals, you've [already] got a home. You should go where they don't want you."

Not an unreasonable call to arms. Where is it written that only liberal Democrats can champion civil liberty? If there is any validity left to the conservative claim of championing the sanctity of the individual, it will mean that civilized conservatives—led by none other than William Buckley—need to break with the zealots who now control the action on the right. Reagan did this once in challenging the infamous Briggs initiative in California, which would have banned gay teachers from the schools. For consistency's sake, now is the time for these good men to come to the aid of their party and shape the conservative bent as pro-choice—or give up the ghost of being the defenders of individual liberty.

"His commanding officer read a letter he had written home and thundered, 'Are you a Jew faggot?' "