Yanked from the Closet

...The identical argument is heard whenever the subject of gay rights is raised...

...We know he is not putting on an act for the sake of a cause or trying to live up to a preconception...

...Despite the evidence, he never considered himself gay...

...Until quite recently, Bauman lied to himself as well as to others...

...Congressional Quarterly called him the lower chamber's "de facto Republican leader," and his party elders termed him "indispensable...

...Justice, therefore, was not served by the exposure of Robert Bauman, only the aims of the Democratic Party...

...When the story of his evening prowls surfaced, the sound of smacking lips was probably heard as far away as Plains, Georgia, and no doubt those who toasted their good fortune took added pleasure from the fact that he was a doctrinaire opponent of gay rights...

...He forthrightly describes an individual whose public success masked a private chaos of alcoholism, economic profligacy, self-hatred and abasement, and emotional dishonesty...

...To pass the proposed statute, he continued, would indicate his acceptance of practices he could not condone and that he believed society should discourage...

...Denial was another factor...

...Yet anyone who reads only the first third of The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative (Arbor House, 276 pp., $ 17.95) is likely to conclude that he has written an ignoble book...

...Although the last half of the volume, where Bauman gets around to talking about himself, rebounds considerably and, to mymind, makes a genuine contribution to the discussion on homosexuality, it can never wholly undo the damage of the self-serving beginning...

...They simply 'knew' instinctively what they were...

...Waiters & Writing YANKED FROM THE CLOSET BY BARRY GEWEN SUFFERING IS SUPPOSED to ennoble, and Robert Bauman, the former Congressman who lost his office, his career, his wife of 21 years, and his possessions after his homosexuality was revealed in 1980, has suffered a great deal...

...asks Bauman in 1986, noting that the police had files on nine other members of the House and the Senate with similar histories, along with records on numerous aides, military officers, appointed officials, and bureaucrats high and low throughout the government...

...At the 1980 Republican Convention, he placed Jesse Helms' name in nomination for Vice President, and in 1981 he was planning to run for Republican Whip...

...One can imagine what Bauman, famous for his partisan jousting and acerbic barbs, might have said had the shoe been on the other foot...

...And to the ongoing debates over gay rights he brings the lessons of his own experience...

...Where politics was the only game in town, Bauman got as he gave— and if his punishment far exceeded his crime, he can blame that on his friends who deserted him, his wife who left him, the Reagan Administration that refused to find him a job, and his own inability to live within his quite comfortable means...

...Bauman's world fell apart on September 3,1980, when two FBI agents came to his office in the Rayburn Building to offer him a deal: Either he could accept a misdemeanor charge of solicitation for prostitution or else the U.S...

...Bauman was not merely a target for the Democrats, he was a bull's eye...

...As it is, he cannot refrain from offering a gratuitous and enigmatic remark about the man who defeated him in his last Congressional race: "Throughout the three weeks of the 1980 campaign one of the most difficult things I had to deal with was not the attacks on me but the issue of Roy Dyson's private life...

...Bauman's personal friends read like a New Right's Who's Who: Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., Richard Viguerie, Larry MacDonald, Henry J. Hyde...

...As someone who, during his years in Congress, righteously opposed gay rights legislation, he cannot deny the charge of hypocrisy, but explains that he "compartmentalized" the different arenas of his existence: "Suchcom-partmentalization allowed me to act in a flagrantly irrational manner in one part of my private life while at the same time permitting me to believe my considerable political accomplishments outweighed the evil I might do...

...He was devastated when the Catholic Church annulled his marriage on the grounds that he was a homosexual...

...It was a wild miscalculation to start out on the attack...

...When the New York City Council was considering legislation to outlaw discrimination against gays a few years ago, one Councilman was asked how he could justify supporting anti-discrimination measures for blacks and women but not for homosexuals...

...By focusing on the questionable motives of his prosecutors instead of on his own culpability, this talented lawyer and public debater leaves the impression that he is simply trying to cop a plea...

...Obviously, some one person or persons within the Carter Administration made a calculated decision to finger me for action...

...Bauman's sources tell him approval in a case like his would have had to come from the top, and he suggests the individuals most likely to have delighted in the news of his other life were House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, a fixture in Baltimore's Democratic establishment...

...Is this the reason he avoids telling us his reactions to Edward Kennedy's Chappaquiddick troubles...

...It would be as easy to 'cure' white or black skin pigmentation or the color of one's eyes.' "Gay," insofar as it connotes joy or pride, even arrogance, is not a word that one would apply to Bauman, nor does he apply it to himself without qualms...

...Arriving in Congress in 1973 after a special election, he was an outspoken Rightwinger, a founder of Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union who, through his parliamentary skills and eye for detail, quickly became one of the most influential lawmakers on the Hill, the "watchdog of the House...

...Compassion was not exactly a touchstone of his career...

...Others, who accept this argument about choice, suggest homosexuals are sick, and should seek help rather than legal protection...

...All of this makes those comments about the "strict and impartial application of the law" particularly smarmy...

...Politics, as they say, ain't beanball, and he understood the rules as well as anybody...

...Certainly, Bauman did not "choose" to risk everything he had worked so hard to achieve for some fleeting moments of physical gratification...

...He takes no joy in his situation...

...Bauman offers himself as a refutation to this line of thinking...

...Indeed, now that he has added personal honesty to his forensic talents, the former Gentleman from Maryland has the potential to became as powerful a voice for homosexual rights as he once was for the New Right...

...The subject of pederasty, for example, is never really addressed...

...It is this "unhappy consciousness" that makes his testimony about the homosexual experience so valuable...

...He rccognizes today that a number of the votes hecast in Congress may have hurt needy and vulnerable people: " It was always easier to advocate a clampdown on 'welfare cheaters' than to envision a squalid country shack where some black mother's children would have less to eat if stricter 'aid to dependent children' rules were imposed from Washington...

...although he may have been singled out, he was not a victim...

...Today, as someone who has been to several doctors and would welcome a cure if he could find one, he is better informed: " In all my extensive reading I discovered no instance of a documented' cure' of homosexuality and it is my impression that none exists...

...Yet Bauman's struggle to get at the truth is clear...

...That is a gamble no ordinary person would elect to make, yet, like Bauman, thousands of seemingly ordinary people make it every day...

...Even in the statement he made following his appearance in court, he was able to speak only of "homosexual tendencies" associated with alcoholism...

...To that notion, also, Bauman has a response...

...He replied that whereas blacks and women were born the way they were and could not change, homosexuals had a choice...

...They could always decide not to be homosexuals...

...It has obviously been a major step for him (as it would be for anyone) to accept a new self-definition...

...Pain has deepened his sensitivity toothers' difficulties...

...When he was a Congressman, engaging in self-deception, he too thought homosexuality was a condition requiring treatment...

...The sole "choice" available to these individuals is the one the Catholic Church insists upon—and Bauman understandably rejects—between abstinence and sin...

...Their purpose was not strict and impartial application of the law, but rather to make sure that my personal conduct was exposed before the 1980 elections...

...Bauman was a political comer if ever there was one...

...He is right, of course...

...Though he remains a conservative capable of praising the Reagan Revolution, he argues now for a "humane conservatism," one that leavens fiscal responsibility with compassion and understanding...

...HIS PERSONAL calamity, however, has forced him to confront himself for the first time in his life, a painful process that is recounted in the last half of the book...

...He cannot be dismissed, and should not be ignored...

...Were he free to choose, he would be a heterosexual: "I had no such choice, and I have never encountered another gay person who claims to have made such a choice, either in person or in my extensive reading on the subject...

...Why me...

...But he has no cause to complain about the treatment he received...

...He answers with Washington's oldest counter-accusation: politics...

...Attorney would seek an indictment for his felonious sexual activities involving several young and underage men from the capital's gay underground...

...Based on the hesitancies and equivocations spread across many of the pages, that process is still going on...

...In retrospect," Baumansays, "I seriously doubt that those bent on prosecuting me ever intended that the matter be handled quietly, in spite of their specific assurances to the contrary...

...His sexual orientation, he declares, is not a matter of preference...

...These "persons" could not have been small fry...