One evening, miffed after yet another argument with a left-wing queer, I went to Amazon.com and typed in the keywords "gay conservative", determined to buy every book that came up.
And I did. I bought both of them.
No, I'm kidding. There were three of them.
Since then, I've managed to amass a gay conservative library of about a dozen books. Most of them are out of print, but they can be bought from used book dealers. All of them are linked below for your convenience. I'll be writing reviews of these books as time allows.
This comic strip is written by a left-wing queer who has still created a humorously honest portrait of a couple of right-wing queers. Read this; you know these guys. To buy the collection, go here.
Very interesting and balanced documentary. You can watch a preview of it here.
I think this site can now make legitimate claim to "diversity": Ms. Bruce is a registered Democrat who voted for Reagan and has appeared on Fox News. She refuses to abandon her party despite her opposition to much of its current agenda, and explains that the rest of the liberals moved left while she stayed in the same place.
Ms. Bruce expressed amusement when a (Libertarian) journalist accused her, a pro-choice feminist Lesbian, of promoting a conservative Republican agenda. I hate to break it to you, Tammy, but I'm a conservative Republican and I agree with you 90% of the time.
Party Crasher : A Gay Republican Challenges Politics As Usual
by Rich Tafel
Gays on the Right: The Role of Gay and Lesbian Republicans in Contemporary American Politics
Anthology edited by Rich Tafel
Coming Out Conservative : An Autobiography
by Marvin Liebman
House and Home
by Steve Gunderson And Rob Morris With Bruce Bawer
Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy
Bruce Bawer, Editor.
A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society
by Bruce Bawer
The Gentleman from Maryland : The Conscience of a Gay Conservative.
by Robert E. Bauman
This is the moving autobiography of a gay Republican who was forced out of the closet. Societal expectations, as well as his Catholic faith, compelled him to hide his homosexuality even from himself, though he could not refrain from furtive homosexual encounters. Eventually he became one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress. In addition, he was married to a woman he cared for deeply and had four children he loved with her. In short, no queer in history has ever been more motivated to overcome his own homosexuality.
His wife had discovered some gay pornography among his possessions when he was outed to the rest of the world. Because of her discovery, Bauman was already in counseling with both a psychiatrist and with a priest. I cite all these facts to illustrate the absurdity of claims that homosexuality can be "cured". Neither psychotherapy nor Jesus nor all the motivation in the world could help Bauman win his decades-long struggle against his sexual orientation.
As a staunchly conservative Republican during the Carter presidency, naturally Bauman was a stumbling block to the powers that be. He is proud of this accomplishment: "Among my accomplishments which gained national notice was a successful single-handed torpedoing of President Jimmy Carter's proposal for a national gasoline tax boost, the initiation of a rare "resolution of inquiry" leading to the revelations concerning brother Billy Carter's Libyan oil deal activities, the defeat and then resurrection of the Panama Canal treaty implementation legislation, and the imposition of tight restrictions on the millions of dollars in aid President Carter insisted on giving the Communist Sandinista government in Nicaragua."
During his campaign, Carter described Bauman as "a good example of all that is wrong with the Republican party." As a major threat to the administration's left-wing agenda, he had to go. There were plenty of closeted homosexuals in Washington, elected officials as well as lower-profile government figures, in both parties. Bauman frequently ran into other Congressmen in gay bars and gay gatherings. He could have wrecked many political careers of friend and foe by naming names, but didn't. On the orders of the Carter administration, the FBI found a young man Bauman had had a brief encounter with, got the young man to fabricate a few spurious allegations in addition to the already embarrassing fact that Bauman had indulged in illicit gay sex, and improperly alerted the media at a critical point in Bauman's re-election campaign.
After Bauman was outed, his political career was destroyed. A few gay-rights groups expressed interest in employing his political acumen but dropped him when they realized, apparently to their surprise, that he wasn't going to jettison his conservative principles just because he was gay. Everyone else was afraid to be associated with him. His marriage also finally collapsed despite great effort on his part to save it. He had everything to lose from being gay, and he lost it. He makes no attempt to evade responsibility for the things he did wrong, for his infidelity, alcoholism and dishonesty. Several times in the course of this book he admits that he acted wrongly.
The first part of this book is a memoir, the second an exploration of the nature of homosexuality. Bauman read widely during his therapy and his struggles to rebuild his life. He discusses the Catholic Church's doctrines on homosexuality, calling for it and other major religious organizations to re-evaluate their positions on homosexuality: "The true paradox lies in the fact that the gay, more than the non-gay person, desperately needs a greater dimension of spirituality simply in order to survive." And a few pages later: "I firmly believe increased spirituality for gays is an essential element in answering the unique and painful demands imposed upon the homosexual."
Every homosexual who has struggled against his or her orientation, especially those of us who are religious, will identify with Bauman's ordeal, and the answers he found for himself can be helpful for the rest of us. This memoir is also of interest to gay conservatives, letting us know that there are more of us out there than it seems, reassuring us that we don't have to give up our values because of our orientation.
When he wrote this book, Bauman's life was at a very low point. Readers will be happy to know that now he is legal counsel for the Sovereign Society, which promotes financial privacy and success for Americans, and I have heard but not confirmed that he has found a life partner.
Mr. Bauman continues to fight the good fight. He is now on the Board of Directors of FEAR (Forfeiture Endangers American Rights), on the Executive Committee of the Sovereign Society, and a practicing attorney in Florida.
Good Faith Breeds Bad Cops
Reason Online article by Mr. Bauman.
Threats to Financial Freedom
Talk given by Mr. Bauman to the Eris Society in Colorado.
Hero of Flight 93: Mark Bingham
by Jon Barrett
This 9/11/01 hero was a homosexual and a Libertarian with Republican sympathies.
In the aftermath of 9/11, several news articles mentioned that Mark Bingham was gay and a Republican. As a gay Republican myself, this naturally interested me. However, according to this biography, he was actually a Libertarian, though like most Libertarians he agreed with the GOP on many issues and on at least one occasion he worked for a Republican's campaign.
What's really striking about this biography is how very normal Mark Bingham was. He was nicer than a lot of people, and he did show a protective instinct all of his life; once he attacked a mugger to protect his friends from him. But aside from this, he was a fairly ordinary young man with career successes and failures behind him, working and having fun with his friends and wondering if he was doing the right thing with his life and if he was ever going to find a life partner.
It was also a little amusing that the biographer tried to gloss over one of the few qualities in Mark Bingham that would be likely to offend some: he was a "bear" and like some conventionally masculine gay men, effeminate gay men bothered him. Barrett mentions this as briefly as he can and then emphasizes the more tolerant comments Bingham made about effeminate gay men, trying to imply that Bingham knew his distaste for them was wrong and was striving to overcome it. Maybe that's true, but I could see that Barrett was concerned that this bit of personal taste might prejudice gay readers against him.
All in all, it's a good and balanced study of an ordinary man who became a hero because the opportunity sought him out. It's inspiring to know that such an ordinary man can be so heroic.
Do Ask, Do Tell : A Gay Conservative Lashes Back: Individualism, Identity, Personal Rights, Responsibility and Community in a Libertarian Third millenium
by Bill Boushka
Access the text online here.
The author's confusion is evident starting with the title, in which he tries to identify himself as both a conservative and a libertarian. In fact, he's neither.
The book is basically a screed in which he sets forth his opinions without really giving us any reason why we should care what he thinks. His egotism is evident in the Introduction and never does let up.
And a lot of what he thinks sounds pretty alarming to conservatives and libertarians alike. I'm a conservative, and I showed some highlights of this book to a Libertarian friend of mine to find out what she thought.
Boushka: "I would see that legal precedents sometimes leave our liberties up to political barter, and that to simultaneously protect personal rights and encourage personal responsibility, we need a bottom-up review of our Bill of Rights."
Me: "...The idea of 'reviewing' the Bill of Rights doesn't strike you as pretty damned dangerous? Are you really that confident that the new version will be better? And if so, would you like to buy some oceanfront property?"
My Libertarian friend: "It is my Libertarian opinion that there is nothing less Libertarian than to start tinkering with the Bill of Rights. We're *all about* the Bill of Rights. We love it to little bits. Where does he get this stuff?"
Boushka: "People ask me why I still call myself a 'conservative.' After all, libertarianism would advocate the use of the established political power structure to deconstruct itself, an idea that some people find contradictory. When at their best, conservatives advocate government's interfering with individual's personal and economic decisions... as little as possible, yet conservatives realize that the survival... of ordered liberty can't be taken for granted. Certainly, my writings up to this point reflect both concerns."
[The ellipses indicate where he sticks in extraneous references to various thinkers whose concepts slightly converged with his own.]
Me: "Well, at least you got the bit about the survival of ordered liberty not being taken for granted right. But what's this about 'deconstructing' the government? I've long considered Libertarians to be our allies; have I been unknowingly hand in hand with revolutionaries?"
My Libertarian friend: "The power structure needs to be deconstructed from within? Um... Okay? In what sense of the word deconstructed would that be, sir? The craaaazy academic literary theory way, or the actually destroying it way? That sentence made no sense."
He also outlines a "right to privacy" constitutional amendment he wants passed. It's longer than all the existing amendments put together. I have to admit that most of it I would agree with as legislation, but amending the Constitution is an extreme measure. And of course, there's the couple of things in it I can't approve of.
The man's grasp of the English language leaves a great deal to be desired. A sample is this monument to convolution:
"Algebra invokes the manipulation of symbols as surrogates for numbers or objects. As a child, it had sounded like a great mystery, doing arithmetic or `figuring' with `letters' rather than numbers. Some people never understand the abstraction, and stay back at the grade school level where you never do your `number work' in ink."
That second sentence, taken as written, means that algebra sounded like a great mystery when it was a child. I wonder what algebra sounded like when it grew up. In the final sentence, he switches from the third to the second person midway through. And the entire book is written this way. This kind of sloppiness is natural in spoken conversation, but has no place in a published work. Another beauty turns up in his discussion of abortion: "We weigh the moral values of a woman's control over her own pregnancy and of the unborn's penultimate right to live." The unborn's next to the last right to live? I wonder what the unborn's antepenultimate right is.
There are, at a generous estimate, perhaps a dozen gay conservative books out there. Even with this scarcity, I have to say, don't bother with this one.
Lavender (But Not Pink), or, How Can You Be Gay and Conservative?
Gay Marriage.
Gays in the Military.
Links of interest.
Homocons and AIDS
What is a Homocon?
Outing Gay Republicans: The New McCarthyism
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