POLITICAL SCANDALS

Homosexuality has been a central theme in many American political scandals. Historically, gay political scandals have evolved from quiet, whispered affairs into sensational, media-saturated public dramas. Dismissed by some scholars as trivial or inappropriate to study, a growing number of scholars contend that scandals involving sex and sexuality serve an important social function, stimulating public discussion of normative values and taboo subjects. This has been especially true since the 1970s, as the rise of gay visibility in American society has forced a reevaluation of the political relevance of sexual identity. Since 1980, a high incidence of gay political scandals suggests persistent anxiety in certain segments of society regarding open gay and lesbian participation in the American political system.

Scandals vary in their details, but most include the same components: an alleged transgression of public morality occurs (sometimes real, sometimes fabricated by political rivals or the media), followed by some combination of rumor, cover-up, denial, confession, and a ruined career. In addition to these components, three variables are important to consider in all gay political scandals. The first variable is the role of the media. Sensational coverage in newspapers, magazines, and radio and television news programs can transform trivial rumors into full-blown scandals. However, media exposure is not essential to damage or ruin a person's career. Sometimes scandals are not reported until years after they have occurred, even if they had devastating consequences at the time. Prior to the 1970s, the mainstream press rarely reported anything unfavorable about the private lives of politicians, so there are fewer known gay scandals compared to recent decades. The second variable is the role of partisan politics. Both Democrats and Republicans (though more often Republicans) have exploited social prejudices against gay men and lesbians in order to embarrass rival candidates. As a result, scandals regularly break out during election campaigns. In some cases, campaign advertisements repeatedly remind voters of a rival's past sexual transgressions. In other cases Republican or Democratic Party officials invent rumors outright. The third variable is the role of hypocrisy. The consequences of hypocrisy are more severe than the consequences of alleged or actual sexual transgressions. Since the early 1980s, several congressmen have survived gay scandals by making forthright, honest public statements about their sexual preferences. Politicians discovered in homosexual affairs who have endorsed antigay legislation or who repeatedly deny they are gay despite evidence to the contrary usually end up with wrecked careers.

There are few known lesbian scandals. Persistent gender bias in American politics has effectively shut out most women seeking prominent positions as U.S. senators, representatives, or governors. The few women who attain these high offices usually guard their private lives carefully. Because of this secrecy, along with a misogynist backlash among social conservatives against women's political advances, female politicians are more likely than their male counterparts to be faced with rumors that they are homosexual. Such lesbian rumors are, too often, spread in a hostile spirit. First ladies assuming important leadership roles, such as Hillary Clinton, seem especially prone to unsubstantiated lesbian rumors. (Occasionally, as in Eleanor Roosevelt's case, the rumors have turned out to have some foundation in reality.)

Early Scandals and Nonscandals

A mislabeled painting perpetuated the long-standing myth that Edward Hyde (better known as Lord Cornbury), royal governor of colonial New York and New Jersey (1702–1708), was so loyal to Queen Anne that he regularly donned women's clothing to imitate her. There is little evidence that Cornbury ever actually dressed in women's clothes—the charge was apparently invented by political rivals. In The Lord Cornbury Scandal (1998), Patricia U. Bonomi concluded that politicians of colonial America regularly besmirched their rivals with suggestions of effeminacy and gender inversion. Cornbury is the first known example of such a smear, but even George Washington was not immune to such attacks, as cartoonists drew caricatures of him in women's clothing. These scandals of the eighteenth century established the pattern for gay scandals in the following years by associating a politician's lack of "manliness" with his lack of leadership abilities, exposing the masculinist pretenses of American political power throughout the centuries.

During the nineteenth century, the American press avoided reporting political scandals involving homosexuality or sodomy, although at least one president—Democrat James Buchanan, who served from 1857 to 1861—preferred male company. Distinguished in American history as the only bachelor president, Buchanan's close male companions were the objects of rumor, curiosity, and the occasional snide remark, but these had no noticeable effect on his political career—a remarkable fact considering how controversial a suspected gay or lesbian presidential candidate would subsequently become. Historians debate whether the so-called romantic friendships of the nineteenth century, such as Buchanan's, involved sexual gratification and caution that such intimate relationships were not necessarily sexual. Abraham Lincoln, for example, has also been the object of modern-day speculations about his sexual orientation, but his bed sharing as a young man with a close male friend was not unusual in a frontier environment with scarce resources for bedding. Buchanan's same-sex intimacies, in contrast, were a well-established pattern throughout his life, even during his presidential term. Regardless of Lincoln's or Buchanan's actual sexual behavior, these debates 150 years later have achieved scandal-like dimensions for even suggesting that an American president—especially one as revered as Lincoln—might have been sexually attracted to other men.

The Roosevelt Era

In 1920 future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the target of a misfired gay scandal while campaigning as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. Rhode Island publisher John Rathom, a longtime Roosevelt family foe, alerted several newspapers to Roosevelt's regrettable decision, while assistant navy secretary, to approve a plan to entrap suspected homosexuals using navy soldiers as decoys in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1919. Rathom also hinted that Roosevelt himself was gay, but newspapers heavily censored the story because homosexuality was still a taboo topic for the press, and the scandal failed to spread. The remainder of Roosevelt's career was unfettered by gay rumors, but ironically his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was likely a lesbian, according to her biographer, Blanche Wiesen Cook. Eleanor Roosevelt had her first Boston marriage with an older woman in college, and throughout her life enjoyed intimate, romantic relationships with other women, carefully balancing a secretive private life with a long, successful—and very public—career as a political activist.

A prominent member of the Roosevelt administration, Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles, lost his career to scandal after he propositioned several train porters in 1940 while intoxicated, embarrassing himself in front of visiting dignitaries. President Roosevelt tried to keep the incident a secret, but a rival Democratic Party faction led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull continued to circulate the story, hoping it would land in the press. After two years of mounting gossip, Roosevelt asked for Welles's resignation when he learned that the Washington Herald was ready to print a story about the incident. The story never appeared—newspapers explained Welles's resignation in vague political terms instead. Some newspaper columnists close to the events dropped hints, but details of Welles's embarrassing train ride did not receive full press coverage until the 1950s.

The McCarthy Era

It is now known that many influential political figures of the McCarthy era lived secret lives as gay men, including J. Edgar Hoover, Whittaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, and perhaps even Joe McCarthy himself. The most consistent target of gay rumors during the 1950s, however, was Illinois governor and two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson's divorced status and intellectual egghead image—regarded as feminine by critics—became favorite media topics during his 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns. Columnists jokingly referred to him as Adelaide, and both the Chicago Daily News and Confidential magazine insinuated that Stevenson's divorce resulted from his lack of sexual interest in women. Federal Bureau of Investigation records (notoriously inaccurate) labeled Stevenson a "confirmed" homosexual. It is doubtful that these gay rumors, never well supported by evidence, influenced his presidential defeats. His divorce, however, during an era of glorification of the American nuclear family, proved a major political liability.

A scandal with more serious career implications emerged during the 1964 presidential campaign. On 7 October 1964, Walter Jenkins, longtime adviser to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, was arrested for committing "lewd acts" with another man in a Washington, D.C., Young Men's Christian Association bathroom. It was his second arrest—one years earlier had gone unnoticed by the public. In this case, the Barry Goldwater Republican campaign learned of the incident and gave the story to United Press International (UPI). The story spread across the nation over UPI's wire service, and Johnson asked for Jenkins's resignation a week later, ending a twenty-five-year professional relationship.

National security concerns figured prominently in the Jenkins scandal. Federal government policies instituted in 1953 prohibited employing homosexuals in sensitive positions because of their alleged susceptibility to blackmail by communist spies. As a top-level presidential advisor, Jenkins had access to top secret documents, and Republicans exploited the incident to portray the Johnson administration as "soft" on communism. Only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, anxieties over nuclear apocalypse were acutely high during the 1964 election. A Johnson television advertisement, for example, suggested that Goldwater would blow up the world if elected. The scandal had little effect on the election, with Johnson defeating Goldwater in a landslide, but Jenkins's hasty, sudden demise reflected the intermingled scapegoating of communists and homosexuals so common during the Cold War.

The Reagan Era: A Golden Age for Gay Political Scandals

A surge of well-publicized gay political scandals broke out in the 1980s. A major reorientation of American journalism had occurred during the 1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis, as the media sought increasingly to expose the hypocrisy of public officials. Meanwhile, growing gay visibility in American society had lifted journalistic taboos on reporting homosexual issues. A resurgence in political conservatism, however, culminating in Republican Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential election, challenged the new-found gay visibility on the streets and in the media. In this context, the gay scandal wave was an important component of the 1980s-era culture wars, which pitted conservatives against liberals on social issues including abortion, school prayer, and gun control.

Many scandal victims were conservative Republicans. In 1980 Robert Bauman, a U.S. representative from Maryland who was an outspoken "family values" proponent and the president of the American Conservative Union, was arrested after soliciting a sixteen-year-old male. Bauman blamed his homosexual behavior on alcohol, desperately denying he was gay, but his conservative financial supporters distanced themselves from him, sinking any reelection hopes. According to most interpretations, his denials and blatant political hypocrisy disturbed constituents more than did the arrest itself. Bauman had sponsored the antigay Family Protection Act and loudly supported legislation denying certain privileges to gay and lesbian veterans. By the middle 1980s, his career finished, Bauman finally accepted his sexuality and wrote a memoir, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative (1986).

Republican Mississippi U.S. Representative Jon Hinson's scandal was more complex. On 8 August 1980 Hinson voluntarily—and quite dramatically—announced to reporters his involvement in two homosexual incidents during the past decade, including a 1976 arrest for committing an "obscene act" with an ex-marine at the Iwo Jima Memorial. Like Robert Baumen, he apologized for his transgressions but denied that he was gay. Standing next to his wife Cynthia, Hinson described his return to heterosexuality as a "born again" experience. After checking into a psychiatric hospital, Hinson told the press he was "sick," continuing to deny his homosexual orientation. His wealthy financial backers pulled their support, ending his political career. In the 1990s Hinson came to support gay rights causes. He died of AIDS at the age of fifty-three in 1995.

Survival by Disclosure

As Bauman and Hinson suffered through their career-wrecking scandals, rumors of widespread prostitution and drug running by Capital Hill pages provoked a massive investigation in 1980. Special Counsel Joseph Califano led a multiyear investigation that scrutinized hundreds of government workers' private lives. He found scant evidence of drug running or the rumored prostitution ring, but nonetheless brought to light a few isolated cases involving congressmen that quickly grew into media sensations. One of these cases centered on the involvement of Massachusetts Democratic U.S. Representative Gerry Studds with a seventeen-year-old male page in 1973. Facing professional jeopardy, Studds came out on the floor of the House of Representatives on 14 July 1983, becoming the first openly gay member of Congress. Studds received a congressional censure after apologizing for the 1973 page incident. Massachusetts voters forgave him, reelecting him to a seventh term in 1984.

Barney Frank, also a Democratic U.S. representative from Massachusetts, survived a more complex scandal later in the decade. Elected in 1980, Frank admitted he was gay in 1987 to little fanfare or controversy. In 1989, however, reports surfaced of a male prostitution ring operating from one of Frank's apartments. A live-in housekeeper and errand boy named Stephen Gobie admitted operating an escort service from Frank's apartment. Frank quickly fired Gobie and requested that the House Ethics Committee investigate the allegation. Gobie, meanwhile, sought a book deal for his pimping escapades, telling the press that his prostitutes regularly serviced Frank. The media pursued the story, revealing Gobie as a pathological liar, and the House Ethics Committee cleared Frank of all major charges. Frank had, however, unduly used his influence to clear thirty-one parking tickets for Gobie, and the committee also discovered a misleading letter of recommendation written by Frank on Gobie's behalf. With Newt Gingrich leading the charge, many Republicans demanded Frank's expulsion from Congress, but in the end Frank received only a mild reprimand. Since the scandal, Frank has enjoyed one of the most successful careers of any openly gay or lesbian politician.

Rumors and Hearsay

Other scandals in the 1980s were sparked by rumors rather than actual transgressions. During the 1984 governor's race in Mississippi, a newspaper story claimed that three male prostitutes in Jackson's red-light district had serviced Democratic candidate Bill Allain. While investigating the charges, the media cruelly ridiculed the prostitutes—all female impersonators—in particular, a Diana Ross impersonator named Devia Ross. After inconsistencies in the story emerged, it was discovered that the female impersonators had invented the account in exchange for Republican bribes. As the scandal unfolded, Republican-hired private detectives held the trio hostage in a motel room, controlling the media's access to them.

The scheme backfired on Republicans, and Allain handily won the election.

In 1989 rumors circulated about a videotape featuring a prisoner describing his sexual affair with the incoming Speaker of the House, Thomas Foley. The Democratic representative had been married for twenty-one years and had never been the object of gay rumors in the past. The tape never surfaced, and evidence suggests it was just another Republican invention. Foley became Speaker of the House but felt humiliated about having his sex life discussed in public. Political commentators have suggested that the rumors dampened Foley's political style, making him less willing to challenge Republican opposition for fear the rumor would return.

Gossip and innuendo has dominated many gay scandals of the 1990s as well. During a 1996 campaign, a Democratic rival indirectly suggested that Republican U.S. Representative John Kasich of Ohio was having an affair with his male chief of staff. Kasich's repeated denials, however, fueled more media speculation about his sexuality than the initial accusation. When Jim Kolbe, a Republican U.S. representative from Arizona, heard rumors in 1996 that The Advocate planned to out him in its next issue, he followed the lead of Studds and Frank by coming out first, proving that the rumors were correct in addition to saving his career.

As in Lord Cornbury's day, prevailing assumptions about gender, sexuality, and power manifest themselves in American political institutions. The rumor of Cornbury's cross-dressing is comparable to rumors over U.S. senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton's ostensible lesbianism, prevalent on Internet chat rooms, Web sites, right-wing talk radio, and the tabloid press. As Cornbury was caricatured wearing a dress, Clinton has been lampooned as overly masculine, hence a lesbian by association. As the shock of having openly gay men and women in political office diminishes, the nature of sex scandals will necessarily adjust to new circumstances. But debates over sex, gender, and sexuality will continue to be manifested in public political dramas of some form.

Bibliography

Bauman, Robert E. The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

Bonomi, Patricia U. The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Collins, Gail. Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics. New York: Morrow, 1998.

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt. 2 vols. New York: Viking, 1992, 1999.

Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

King, Anthony. "Sex, Money, and Power." In Politics in Britain and the United States: Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Richard Hodder-Williams and James Ceaser. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986.

——. Markovits, Andrei S., and Mark Silverstein, eds. The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988.

Ross, Shelley. Fall from Grace: Sex, Scandal, and Corruption in American Politics from 1702 to the Present. New York: Ballantine, 1988.

Sabato, Larry J., Mark Stencel, and S. Robert Lichter. Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.

Thompson, John B. Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

Williams, Robert. Political Scandals in the USA. Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1998.

Craig M. Loftin

see alsocohn, roy; frank, barney; government and military witchhunts; hammond, james henry; hoover, j. edgar; mississippi; roosevelt, eleanor, and lorena hickock; welles, sumner.

The sexual preferences of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton have also been the source of debate. As with many historical cases, the evidence is open to many interpretations.

Joe McCarthy planned to call Adlai Stevenson a "pansy" in a speech during the 1952 presidential campaign, but dropped the reference after Democrats threatened to respond by exposing an extramarital affair of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Walter Jenkins was married with six children at the time of his scandal.

During the course of the Allain scandal, female impersonator Devia Ross stormed out of a hostile interview with television scandalmonger Geraldo Rivera.

The first member of Congress to die from symptoms of AIDS was Republican U.S. representative Stewart McKinney of Connecticut in 1987. He succumbed to death shortly after spending a cold evening on Capitol Hill protesting conditions facing the homeless in Washington, D.C.