The air in Washington was already thick with gay scandal in 1982 when Christopher Street published an excerpt from Perry Deane Young’s God’s Bullies, an investigation of the New Right, with the cover line “Sleeping With the Moral Majority.” The face on the cover was that of Terry Dolan, the co-founder of NCPAC, a brash norm-breaker of the Reagan revolution who bragged about the lies he could spread and the campaign finance laws he could skirt. By day, Dolan coordinated the New Right’s attempted fusion of anti-government fanaticism and evangelical fundamentalism. He had a weekly lunch with Jerry Falwell. And at night, he dressed in the gay fashions of the moment and cruised the gym steam room and DC’s gay bars.
Young takes us into the not-so-secret underworld of the “RPQs,” or “Rich and Powerful Queens” behind the Reagans:
All of these people are part of an underground society of very wealthy and powerful homosexuals, some of whom were at the heart of the earlier anti-Communist and anti-homosexual crusades of Joseph McCarthy, and all of whom are active in the new-right groups. Their true sexual identities keep them from any kind of public roles, but this vulnerability has also put them in touch with some of the country’s biggest sources of money, however corrupt. Like the women, Jews, or blacks who succeeded in spite of societal attitudes about their kind, these men have a stake in preserving their own oppression. They don’t see it as oppression at all. They see it as privilege conferred on them because they are special; if other homosexuals suffer from oppression, then they deserve it because they are so weak or just not clever enough.
But the real impact of his chapter, which as Jamie Kirchick writes, was “passed around like samizdat throughout the White House,” was to finally, publicly out Terry Dolan. Young interviewed a male Library of Congress employee who went on the record to describe having sex with Dolan and only gradually realizing who he was.
In this episode, we’re joined by writer Daniel Lefferts to talk about the contradictions of right-wing gays past and present: why stories like Dolan’s continue to fascinate us, even in an era when political scandal barely exists anymore. We look at how Dolan was beset by contradictions as a homosexual in a historically small-government party that was now allied with authoritarian evangelicals. We talk about the pleasures both of being an insider and of hating insiders, and why the closeted, right-wing homosexual still stirs the gay imagination to fascination, disgust, and sympathy. What do we imagine we will accomplish by forcing this type of compartmentalized homosexual to face his contradictions?
Also discussed in this episode:
- Daniel’s visit to a post-election Log Cabin Republicans party
- Why the petty-bourgeois class position of OnlyFans boys makes them more likely to be MAGA
- Why so many gay guys secretly (or not-so-secretly) listen to Red Scare
- Milo Yiannopoulos as a throwback to Wildean gay decadence
- How right-wingers successfully spread the lie that Republicans are hot
- How homoeroticism has permeated our political culture in a weirdly non-gay way
Go deeper into this episode on Substack
Blake Smith
David Sessions
