History may be written by the victors, but Neil J. Young’s excellent new book, “Coming Out Republican,” is a sympathetic look at one of the past century’s losers: the gay conservative. Young, a historian by training, has spent his career explaining the heterogeneity of the conservative movement. His first book, “We Gather Together,” was about the alliances and rivalries among Catholics, Mormons and evangelicals that birthed the Christian right, and Young has written about religion and politics for the New York Times and CNN.
“Coming Out Republican” moves from the 1950s to the present, telling the stories of the closeted operators and buttoned-up political clubs that often served as the Myrtle Wilson to the Christian right’s Daisy Buchanan, their sense of entitlement out of proportion to the way their supposed allies treated them. Sometimes these gay men acted gallantly to expand the individual freedoms of their queer countrymen. But there are also many instances in the book of them selling out the other civil rights movements in whose wake they traveled. “Coming Out Republican” is less about an interest group than a self-interest group, one that has long been unable to envision a liberation project more ambitious than expanding the sexual prerogatives of White men.
“Coming Out Republican” is at its best when using profiles of individual men to depict the eras in which they lived. Leonard Matlovich, a Vietnam War hero, came out in 1975 and sued the federal government to reenlist after he was kicked out of the military. Conservative and macho, Matlovich claimed that “everything I am and everything I hope to be I owe to the United States Air Force.” He relied on Frank Kameny, of the gay advocacy group the Mattachine Society, and a lawyer from the ACLU to sue on his behalf. Appearing on the cover of Time magazine, he had a dark mustache from central casting, but he was an imperfect poster boy, all-American but naive about gay life. He once bashfully asked a reporter from the Advocate — an eminent gay magazine — what the publication was.
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In his study of Matlovich, Young deftly, if a little dryly, parses the cross currents of imperialism, respectability and internecine gay resentment. His prose is at times as vanilla as the men he writes about, relying on ventriloquism of vulgar gay patois for color. In other illuminating sketches, we meet figures such as Jon Hinson, the Bible-thumping congressman from Mississippi who resigned after getting caught performing oral sex on a Black Library of Congress technician in a bathroom in the Capitol, and Terry Dolan, Ronald Reagan’s whiz kid pollster who bragged about purging moderates from Congress, bulldozing a path for the Christian right’s ascension in the 1980s. They are but two of the legions of closeted Republicans who believed in privacy for a man’s sex life but not, among other things, a woman’s right to an abortion. Young takes so much care describing the different ways Matlovich, Hinson and Dolan conceived of themselves, and the roles they played in the politics of their era, that their deaths feel like a gut-punch. Each one died of AIDS.
Less successful are Young’s sections on gay Republican groups — the Log Cabin Republicans, the Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club, the Lincoln Republican Club, Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, GOProud — whose sheer number of names reflects how often they split off from one another. Most of the book’s colorful characters were better at acting out and working covertly than they were at building large coalitions, so the stakes of their collective action — like persuading a few thousand San Francisco Republicans to oppose a California ballot initiative — feel low.
Young also has the credulous habit of, for example, describing a group whose membership “doubled that year to over 150” and citing the growth as evidence of its strength, when such crowds would barely match a modest gay bar’s Saturday night or a Baptist church’s Sunday services. In instances when gay Republican groups have wielded influence in a decisive way — say, by whipping up a handful of votes to pass civil rights protections in the California legislature and marriage equality in the New York legislature — it is not because they had power that could not be ignored. It is because in the eyes of Republican lawmakers in very liberal states, gay Republicans could, like a mistress that doesn’t ask or expect too much, be indulged from time to time.
But that’s state politics. At the national level, gay Republicans have been betrayed and insulted by every Republican presidential candidate since Reagan. In 1980, they had reasons for optimism. Despite Reagan’s conservative bona fides, two years earlier he helped defeat a California referendum that would have barred gay people from teaching in public schools. But as president, his embrace of the religious right was so close, and his administration’s antipathy for people with AIDS so pronounced, that it further stained the Republican Party’s reputation with gay people. George H.W. Bush ran as a moderate and even signed gay-friendly legislation like the Ryan White Care Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act before abandoning tolerance to court the religious right. Less than a decade after he left office, his son campaigned as a compassionate conservative, and then ran for reelection supporting a constitutional amendment to forbid same-sex marriage. Donald Trump also seemed to embrace LGBTQ people as he campaigned for the 2016 election, but as president he nominated judges hostile to LGBTQ rights and supported policies that made it easier for people claiming religious exemptions to discriminate against sexual minorities.
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Young makes a persuasive case that gay Republicans contributed to the civil rights progress of the last few decades. Intellectuals like Andrew Sullivan and operators like Ken Mehlman, who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign from the closet, contributed to the push for marriage equality and military participation. But neither man — or really any conservative advocate — did nearly as much as Evan Wolfson, the Lambda Legal lawyer, who articulated the intellectual foundations of same-sex marriage and executed the political strategy to make it a reality. The simple fact is that liberal gays have been more clear-eyed about power than their conservative counterparts, better at building coalitions and more wary of placating the Christian conservatives who do not believe there is a place for sexual minorities in public life.
Young could have more forcefully thought through the reluctance of gay Republicans to find common cause with members of other minority groups. The obvious answer is the most uncomfortable one: Gay Republicans see themselves as having more in common with other White people, rich people and men. Unfortunately, the only way that the numerically few can wield power is through solidarity with other minorities, but that requires insight that does not always come easily to White gay men, especially conservative White gay men: None of us is that special, and trying to be “not that kind of gay” comes at a cost. One of the most heartbreaking themes of “Coming Out Republican” is how unfamiliar many conservative gays are with the varying joys of gay life — writing it off as too “PC” or too promiscuous. Being gay can be quite fun, not despite but because of our endless squabbles and struggles over how to keep this life distinct and ours, and open to as many people as want to partake.
Anyone could benefit from reading this book. Straight people will learn how the puritanical impulse to control other people’s ’ sex lives has defined politics for nearly a century, an impulse as old as it is futile. Queer people — who often must teach ourselves our own history — will learn how respectability remains an empty promise. But it is gay Republicans themselves who most need to read Young’s book. If they are not too vain, the Peter Thiels and George Santoses of the world might find in these pages a warning that having power is not the same thing as being tolerated until you are no longer useful.
Nathan Kohrman is a writer covering medicine, politics and culture. Based in New York, he is an incoming general surgery resident at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Coming Out Republican
A History of the Gay Right
By Neil J. Young
University of Chicago Press. 441 pp. $29.99
