TALES from the REPUBLICAN CLOSET

The news from The Atlantic Online is that President Bush’s 2004 campaign manager and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, has come out. That’s right; he’s gay. Yet reading Marc Ambinder’s article forces me to come to a brutal conclusion: I’m not a nice person. If I were nice, I’d have a more sympathetic reaction to Mehlman’s statement:

"It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life ... Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that's made me a happier and better person. It's something I wish I had done years ago."

Instead, I want to scream: what took you so f***ing long? (And by the way, everybody has his own path and her own journey.)

This means that six years ago, when Ken Mehlman was running Bush’s campaign and was thirty-seven years old, well beyond the age of reason, he proceeded as if he was unaware of the Republican Party’s longstanding history of anti-gay posturing, its anti-black Southern Strategy, and its AIDS-phobic culture wars against LGBT artists. He managed to ignore the party’s Let’s-Use-Every-Social-Wedge-Issue-We-Can-Find-To-Cynically-Round-Up-Votes politics. With specific reference to LGBT issues, as Marc Ambinder writes, “[Mehlman’s] tenure as RNC chairman and his time at the center of the Bush political machine coincided with the Republican Party's attempts to exploit anti-gay prejudices and cement the allegiance of social conservatives.”

So now we are being asked to find Mehlman’s personal plight as a public figure at war within himself to be the occasion for a generous welcome to the fold of the LGBT community. Indeed, he is now working against California’s Proposition 8 on behalf of the American Foundation for Equal Rights. Apparently, he has become a “de facto strategist for the group” and has “opened his rolodex” to connect AFER with GOP donors. Gee, it’s such a big-tent party.

But in 2004, when Mehlman was thirty-seven, apparently still struggling with his sexual identity, he didn’t recognize any solidarity with the pain of young men and women a decade or two younger than he was, and with even less experience of life, whose parents, cheered on by a Republican party eager to throw verbal stones at sexual minorities, used God and religion to vilify their own children and make them feel like strangers in their own communities. In other words, despite his professed sexual confusion at the time, he still believed he had wisdom enough to run a presidential campaign and advise other people to vote for the head of a Republican party whose best record on Civil Rights probably ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Mehlman claims that President Bush “was no homophobe.” What a comfort. But was Bush willing to speak against the anti-gay virus which had infected his party in all matters, from national AIDS policy to “don’t ask, don’t tell” to marriage equality to free speech rights for artists in the LGBT community?

Ambinder tells us that Mehlman is now living in “Chelsea, a gay mecca in New York City.” And his new gay friends in the higher echelons are egging him on in his new identity as a gay advocate. According to the Atlantic article, Dustin Lance Black, the Academy Award winning screenwriter of Milk, said, "Ken represents an incredible coup for the American Foundation for Equal Rights. We believe that our mission of equal rights under the law is one that should resonate with every American. As a victorious former presidential campaign manager and head of the Republican Party, Ken has the proven experience and expertise to help us communicate with people across each of the 50 states."

Excuse me while I frow up.