I hate to admit remembering this, but in a January review of Posner's intellectual survey, Brock wrote, "Because Posner is, despite it all, a marvel. He is hyperactive like Harold Bloom, audacious like Christopher Hitchens and a practical man of the world like Alan Greenspan. About how many Americans can that be said?" Get up off your knees and wipe that chin, David! http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/books/review/13BROOKST.html
So anyway, the best piece of writing on gay conservatives I can recall off the top of my head is by that "audacious, misshapen, unkempt, and seemingly unshowered" Mr. Hitchens and reprinted in For the Sake of Argument. (perhaps gay conservatives are holding a grudge?)
The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name Harper's Magazine, August 1985
On 22 May 1985 Anthony Dolan, the President's chief speechwriter, took two full pages, at $2,800 each, in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times. He devoted this space to a long, confused diatribe about homosexuality in American politics and journalism. At certain points in his essay, he posed as the very model of tolerance and fair-mindedness, insisting that he did 'not countenance unfair discrimination or unkindness shown toward homosexuals.' At other points, he reverted to the traditional conservative style, saying that 'homosexual intrigue' in the newsroom of the Washinton Post was so intense that 'poor Ben Bradlee has no one on whom he dares turn his back'. Referring to a recent feature story in the Post, Dolan added: 'Only if the story was vital to some issue of critical importance to the public should a man who had been dead for months be dragged from his grave.' The purport of Dolan's article was the insistence, unusual for a 'family values' conservative, that homosexuality is a private grief and nobody's business except that of the immediate family. The readers of the loyalist Washington Times are confused enough as it is these days. Why, they may have had time to ask, does the President's principle speech writer go on so much about the fags? And, having decided to do so, why does he seem to be of two minds about them? Two reasons suggest themselves for Dolan's perturbation. The first is the recent death of his brother, Terry. The second is the existence - still awaiting honest acknowledgement - of a gay coterie among Ronald Reagan's bizarre network of lucre, guns, and Contras.
Terry Dolan was gay, and he died of AIDS. He died after a short but intense lifetime of ultra-conservative guerrilla theatre, during which he co-founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and helped to create the alliance between the Goldwater right and the blue-collar fundamentalists. It was Dolan's complicated life and AIDS-related death that, after considerable hesitation, the Post had featured....
[etc.,etc.,] The way through this morass is clear. It is marked by a simple signpost reading 'Out." Once Bauman, Dolan, and others acknowledged their homosexuality, they began to evolve politically. Bauman developed a hitherto unsuspected sympathy for the civil rights of black and women. Dolan never quite made it that far. But we know that he was turning against the Moral Majority in his last years, and was disowned by Paul Weyrich and the other conservative barons for his pains. [etc.]