Inside George W. Bush’s Closet

Like myself, a number of LGBT activist and bloggers are former Republicans who finally reached a point where we could no longer live a lie and/or be involved in a political party that held us in contempt at best in terms of official party platform.  Yet others were willing to live a closeted life for advancement and/or political opportunities.  In my view, they basically were willing to sell their souls.  Now, Politico Magazine has a length piece that looks at the closet that existed in Chimperator George W. Bush's failed regime.  Here are some highlights, although one needs to read the entire article:

It was a slap in the face.” Steven Levine is remembering that day in 2006 when President George W. Bush took the stage in a small-town school gym in Indiana. It was October 28, right before the midterm elections, and Levine was a 22-year-old White House advance aide. He’d been camped out in Sellersburg all week, working to get the details just right for Bush’s campaign rally. The flags hung just so, the big presidential seal on the podium. Then Bush started talking, his standard stump speech about taxes and supporting the troops. But a new applause line took Levine by surprise. “Just this week in New Jersey,” the president said, “another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman, and should be defended. I will continue to appoint judges who strictly interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.”

The crowd loved it. Levine was crushed.

He was gay and working for a Republican and convinced it was possible to be both at the same time.

Like dozens of other gay colleagues in the Bush White House, many of them closeted, Levine had been sure that Bush himself was personally tolerant even if the GOP was not—and uncomfortable with gay-bashing as a way to win elections. But this was a rebuff, and it was hard not to take it personally: “To be working extraordinarily hard with all of your energy, working through many nights for somebody that you believe in, and to hear that person that you work so hard for come out against something that you are.”

Levine stayed with Bush right upuntil the president hopped into the armored presidential limo for the ride to Barack Obama’s inauguration 27 months later. As the taillights disappeared down Pennsylvania Avenue, Levine left town. A few months later, one of his gay friends who had also worked in the White House sat down in front of Facebook and counted the Bush White House staffers he knew to be gay. He came up with at least 70 (only two of them women).

That number—and after speaking with two dozen sources I have no doubt it was an incomplete tally—has surprised almost everyone I’ve told.

“Did we have a lot of people in the closet in the administration?” says one former senior official in the Bush White House whose office included at least three gay staffers. “I used to say we had an entire warehouse.”

In recent months, I’ve reported extensively on life in the closet of the Bush White House, and a number of his former aides are quoted on the record in this story for the first time about their experiences as gay Republicans in an administration that was perhaps the last of the era when institutionalized discrimination against gays and lesbians was still legal, if increasingly frowned upon. Their accounts offer a time-capsule view of a Republican Party—and a president—at war with itself over an issue on which public opinion and the law have now changed dramatically. At the time, it seemed to be great politics for Bush

For some of his [George W. Bush's] gay aides, it was a struggle to reconcile the decency they usually saw up close with the frequent reminders, both large and small, that theirs was a party very publicly committed to the view that they were not entitled to the same legal protections as other Americans.

Personally, I cannot grasp the mindset of someone who would sell his/her soul to such a regime and imagined advancement. In my case, when the GOP in Virginia welcomed in the Christofascists and began to intertwine religion and the civil laws, I left the GOP and cited my disgust in my resignation later.  Since that time I have endeavored to see the GOP defeated whenever and wherever possible,  I am convinced that the GOP cannot be changed from within and that only repeated electoral defeats may, and I stress the word may, lead to change.