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NEWS COMMENTARY
On Marvin Liebman’s
Coming Out
Bill Buckley's buddy says "It's exhilirating"
by Paul Varnell
It is impossible to feel anything other than plea
sure that a modem conservative movement "founding
father," Marvin Liebman, now 66, has come out of
the closet. Though never a publicly prominent figure
at the ideological or "spokesperson" level, during the
1950s and 1960s Liebman played an important role at
the organizational and facilitative level, providing
advice, raising funds, and doing public relations.
Liebman helped establish the conservative
National Review in 1955, giving conservative “
thinkers a voice they had not previously had. He
also helped found such organizations as the col
lege-based Young Americans for Freedom in
1960, the New York Conservative Party in 1961,
and the American Conservative Union in 1964.
It is equally impossible not to empathize with
Liebman’s obvious delight at having finally
come out—his feeling of having removed an
area of nagging discontent from his life, of final
ly having put things to rights.
"For the first time in my life, I'm really fac
ing myself without any worry," he told the
Advocate. "I feel liberated."
"It's like a weight has been lifted, " he told
USA Today. "I feel terrific."
Does he recommend that others come out
too? "Absolutely," he says. "It's exhilarating—I
promise that."
From a source not given to gay movement
cliches nor the psychobabble of popular culture,
these words carry weight; they remind us anew
of why our project was originally called "gay
liberation." There is an important point here that
we should not lose in the routinization of leg
islative lobbying, organizational development,
and our internal politics.
The significance of Liebman’s coming out
should not be underestimated. No one doubts
that gays are distributed widely across the political
spectrum. In fact, in his recent biography of William
Buckley, John Judis points to "the presence of several
homosexuals among his closest friends." But there
has been little or no conspicuous gay presence on the
right, no one "made an issue of it"—until Liebman. It
has seemed on the right to be (as conservative thinker
Richard Weaver once said of blacks in the South) that
gays might be accepted as individuals, but not as a
group or even a type of person. Liebman’s coming
out challenges that posture. And for that we should
be grateful.
But Liebman goes further. He argues interestingly
that it is natural for gays to be conservatives. In his
coming out letter to Buckley, published in the
National Review, Liebman calls conservatism, "The
logical political home of gay men and women...the
conservative view based as it is on the inherent rights
of the individual over the state."
That is certainly a view to which I am strongly
attracted, but it is true only to a certain extent. It was
Tim Drake of the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task
Force who provided the proper cautionary note. As
Drake told the Chicago Sun-Times, "Conservative
theory is prominent in defense of individual liber
ty-live and let live—but in practice that is not
always the case."
True enough. When modem "conservativism" was
cobbled together in the late '50s, it conjoined a num
ber of frankly disparate viewpoints—militant anti
communism, an effusive concern with internal sub
version, Catholic religiosity, Victorian sexual morali
ty, states' rights doctrines, opposition to the welfare
state, and a hostility to social change in the name of
"tradition." That none of these entailed a doctrine of
"inherent human rights" against the state—much less
against the rest of society—meant that any slender
strain of libertarian individualism was employed
more as rhetoric than as a working philosophy, and,
except in the field of the economic marketplace, was
frequently overridden by those other doctrinal claims.
As one National Review editor—Willmoore
Kendall—pointed out in one of his more pixilated
moments (and they were legion), it is part of the
American tradition to ride someone out of town on a
rail.
As if to underscore this point, Liebman explains
both in his letter to Buckley and his Advocate inter
view that part of his reason for coming out is his
growing concern about the rise of homophobia and
other forms of bigotry on the right: "In pre-
— N.R. days...the American right was heavily,
perhaps predominantly, made up of bigots.
Political gay-bashing, racism, and anti
Semitism survive...but are for the most part
hidden in the closet. I think they are waiting to
be let out again."
I think that for rhetorical purposes Liebman
exaggerates the "bigot" aspect of the pre-N./?.
right wing. And Liebman has too easy a time of
it in claiming that never "while I was involved"
was there any significant conservative gay
bashing: after all, his period of greatest
involvement spanned the years 1953 to 1968;
but it was not until after the "Stonewall Riots"
of 1969 that gays and gay rights became a
major issue of political discussion. Since 1969,
however, conservative homophobia has been
continual. Perhaps Liebman was simply insuffi
ciently aware of it: he was in England between
1969 and 1975 and thereafter participated in
the indisputably urbane and tolerant circle
around Buckley.
Liebman acknowledges that he has only
recently been thinking about homophobia, that
he has become newly sensitized to homophobia
as a category of behavior, that it is a form of
bigotry. Part of this he attributes to reading gay
books such as Paul Monette's Borrowed Time
and seeing the film Longtime Companion. In
other words, he had some affirmative and self-affirm
ing contact with the gay culture and gay community
we have been trying to produce for some 20 years.
And he saw that there was something of value there.
"So I figured, fuck it, I'm just sick and tired of it.
That's why I decided to come out."
That is exactly how it works; and that is exactly
how it is supposed to work. So welcome, Marvin. I
greet you as a brother. And as ol' Bill Buckley once
said, though in a different context, "The Church
makes room for late conversions."
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