Awareness Is Free

Open the closets on Capitol Hill | Salon.com
“Silence about gay politicians is a relic of an era when gayness meant secrecy and shame. It’s a disservice to gay people, to voters, and to the politicians themselves.
By Louis Bayard

Photo by
Kelly Owen/Zuma Press

Mark Foley at a Palm Beach County, Fla., fundraiser.

Oct. 7, 2006 | In 1960, when Gore Vidal ran for Congress, his Republican opponent tried to spread word that Vidal was a homosexual. This was not, strictly speaking, news. Vidal had written one of the first explicitly gay novels in American literature (“The City and the Pillar”) and had never been at great pains to conceal his private life. But in trying to fan the flames that Vidal himself had ignited, J. Ernest Wharton ran up against a strange conundrum. The same media outlets that would have jumped all over a heterosexual scandal turned strangely mum the moment homosexuality entered the picture. For the New York Times and the Associated Press and Time magazine, this was the love that could not speak its name.

And still can’t. In the swirl of controversy surrounding former Rep. Mark Foley and his overtures to congressional pages, one thing has been clear all along: Foley’s offenses have nothing to do with being gay, everything to do with being a pedophile. And one thing is emerging with new clarity: The mainstream media’s treatment of gay politicians is essentially unchanged from when Gore Vidal ran for office 46 years ago. This long-standing policy of nondisclosure can now safely be called a disservice — to gay people, to voters, to the politicians themselves, to everyone. It must change.

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