Last night I saw Outrage, a documentary that marshals the evidence -- including from former lovers -- that Republicans with anti-gay voting records, such as Charlie Crist, Larry Craig, Jim McCrery, and David Dreier, are indeed gay themselves, despite decades of denials. The hero of the film is Mike Rogers, a D.C.-based blogger who specializes in outing gay Republicans. Rogers has had some major successes. His outing of the 2004 RNC field director, Dan Gurley, led to Gurley leaving GOP politics and beginning a new career as a pro-gay marriage activist. Yet many of Rogers' targets are still deeply closeted. The self-hatred of the closet, the film contends, leads these politicians to cut off AIDS funding, oppose gay marriage and gay adoption, and present themselves as "family values conservatives."
The film tries very hard to make the case that outing is a moral act. Sometimes a gay politician's hypocrisy runs so deep, it is difficult to argue with that. Yet the film never really addresses, in any meaningful way, whether closeted Democrats also deserve to be outed. Mike Rogers claims that "90 percent" of closeted gay politicians are Republicans, and it's easy to understand why the GOP fosters such a culture. But there certainly are Democratic political figures who have long been rumored to be gay or lesbian: Janet Napolitano and Janet Reno, for example. By leaving them out of the story, Rogers and Outrage's filmmaker, Kirby Dick, present an incomplete portrait of what they call the national media "conspiracy" to hide the true sexual identities of closeted gay politicians. For if Charlie Crist and Larry Craig benefited from mainstream media silence on their sexuality, so did Reno and Napolitano. But the film doesn't really explore how the closet might affect ambitious political women, or Democrats, differently from the way it affects ambitious political men and Republicans. (Notably, Condi Rice is absent from Outrage. Was it simply too difficult to find evidence to back up claims that she is a lesbian?)
That said, if you believe outing has the potential to push a politician in a more gay-friendly policy direction, Democrats certainly should be subject to the same scrutiny. While governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano opposed an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative in her state while also claiming to oppose gay marriage. That is the Barack Obama Dodge (TM), which has become the dominant, national Democratic position on the issue. It is a pander, and those who espouse it should be pushed to re-examine their views, regardless of their sexuality. After all, what they are supporting is the belief that LGBT Americans should be contented with a "separate" form of "equal." Unfortunately, Outrage, by ignoring the Democratic Party, plays at a kind of willfully blind partisanship.
--Dana Goldstein
Larry Craig's mug shot courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
