Prelude to a scandal

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington

ashington is enjoying another homo- sexual affair. A young man of less than unimpeachable veracity has accused ten representatives of Congress of sexual behaviour with Congressional pages. The Pages are teenagers brought to Washington from all over the country to run errands for members of Congress. They have a special school but they or their families must take care of where and how they live. Amy Carter, who first broke into politics two Years ago as her father's nuclear war ad- viser, is a Congressional page.

As yet the names of all but one of the ac- cused Congressmen are not known. The one who is, a dim figure from Northern Idaho, called a press conference to say that the fact that he is a bachelor did not mean he was a homosexual. Now everybody thinks he is. Before the giggles over Con- gressman Larry Craig had begun to die down, the scandal was being dubbed Tailgate' or 'Rampage'. In the better restaurants your luncheon guests will ask You, 'Why don't Congressmen like to use book marks?' Answer: 'They'd rather turn over the page.'

The law enforcement authorities are not showing much zeal in pursuing this inquiry, although a parallel one directed towards the Use of cocaine on Capitol Hill is expected to end more than one career. Nevertheless, homosexuality, politics and public policy Will continue to be a current affair, if you Will excuse one more pun.

This autumn a major national magazine

of the non-sensational kind will publish a 1_°11g piece on fairy rings in high Washington places. The bound galleys of a book printed by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, a CBS affiliate, are being cir- culated; the book contains a tastelessly clinical description of a homosexual en- counter with the head of a major conser- vative political action committee. Three or four people close to the Reagans are regard- ed as homosexuals and, as if that were not

enough for a 'pro-family' Administration, this book, put out not by a smut house but by a major media conglomerate, contains passages like: ... Many of the key people sent in by Ronald Reagan to plan his inauguration and the transition from the Carter ad- ministration were secretly but actively homosexual. During the Christmas-New Year's holiday season just prior to the in- auguration, they held several private par- ties. One ... took place in the Foggy Bot- tom town house of a man who has been one of Reagan's closest advisers from the begin- ning of his political career. Although he is married and has children, he lives in Washington with a male lover. The guests at his party . .. were all white, all male, and — except for a few young Democrats look- ing for work — all Republicans. Two hand- some young California lovers arrived at the Foggy Bottom party driving matching sports cars and wearing identical shoes, slacks, ties and V-necked sweaters.

`All of these people are part of an underground society of very wealthy and powerful homosexuals ... In Washington a group of such men meets on a regular basis and stages lavish parties fairly often. They actually make up names for their little club, "The RPQs" (rich and powerful queens) or "The Thirteen Richest Fairies".'

When all this and presumably a lot more explodes on the public, it cannot be handled as were homosexual scandals of the past. When Walter Jenkins, a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, was arrested after making a pass at a vice squad police officer in the men's room of the Young Men's Christian Association, it was promp- tly announced that he was sick, suffering from a nervous breakdown due to over- work and he was popped into a hospital.

This is a different America. Lyndon Johnson, who didn't die so long ago, would be aghast. On Gay Pride Days tens of thousands of homosexuals march up the main streets of our major cities. The amaz- ing thing about the homosexual social life around the Reagans is not that it exists but that it has remained as secret as it has. A new kind of homosexual has come among us. There were always the theatrically ef- feminate ones, the Oscar Wildes, but the newly visible sort are not obviously homosexual, at least not to the non- connoisseur. They have made themselves obvious, however, by a code of dress which announces them everywhere: military-style hair-cut, tight blue jeans, boots, what ap- pears to be a tailored T-shirt and a two-by- two swagger.

They cluster together in various neighbourhoods of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Washington, everywhere in such large numbers that they are like a new ethnic group. They also can be rudely unpleasant to those who are not like them. They are as intolerantly discriminatory as heterosexuals have been and often still are to them. We are beginn- ing to hear more and more stories of sexual harassment of heteros by homos. Although lesbianism too has become more obvious there do not seem to be, either in absolute numbers or percentages, as many female homosexuals.

The numbers of male homosexuals, and their pushy differentiation of themselves from heterosexuals, indicate that the Washington scandal, if it comes, will have an unpredictable outcome. That the homosexuals are not going to crawl into their corners can be anticipated in the argu- ment between the army and our most prestigious law schools at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the University of California at Los Angeles. Army recruiters have been barred from their premises because the army will not enlist homosexuals. The Army Judge Advocate has started talking about cancelling Pentagon contracts with these universities, explaining that 'the uni- queness of military service demands that non-discrimination policies with respect to age, physical handicap and sexual preference not be applied to the military services . .. Soldiers are required to live and work under entirely different conditions. Civilians generally need only associate with

their co-workers during business hours. Soldiers, on the other hand, must often, sleep, eat and perform personal hygiene under conditions affording minimal privacy. The presence of homosexuals tends to impair unit morale and cohesion as well as infringing upon the right of privacy of those service members who have more traditional sexual preferences.'

The general, lawyer that he is, has not put his own case as persuasively as he might. History shows that some invincible armies of the past have not barred homosexuals. An outfit could have a homosexual top sergeant and, if he kept his sex life to himself, it would not impair his unit's morale or cohesion. The question is, will today's homosexuals stay in the closet? They are a group and they bring -their own ways with them. It is not hard to see how those ways could wreck a military organisa- tion of heterosexuals which is having trou- ble aplenty now between male and female and black and white.

American homosexuals are apparently being attacked by a number of new and often fatal diseases. Until recently Karposi's sarcoma was a rare form of cancer, the incidence of which was restricted to certain small groups of Italian and Jewish males of very advanced age. Now doctors are diagnosing it in unheard- of numbers among American homosexual men. This same category of patient is also being stricken by infections of a number of bacilli that are frequently found in the, human body and are benign among heterosexuals.

The hypothesis is that homosexuals are getting physiologically potent fractions of semen into their blood streams. These frac- tions are suspected of attacking a man's im- mune system, thereby making him vulnerable to diseases which persons with different `life styles', as they like to say in the newspapers, do not fall prey to. A study done by puzzled doctors revealed that the victims of these diseases, men only in their thirties, averaged more than 1,100 different sexual partners. The control group, which had not contracted any of the homosexual illnesses, averaged 524 different partners. Whatever happened to Mister Average?

Important questions of public policy and civil liberties are going to have to be discuss- ed by the non-homosexual part of the na- tion which gets very little good information but a lot of hysteria on the subject.