GLR November-December 2024

“Wherever I go in this world ... I shall forever be your father’s concubine.” He denies any complicity in the scandal, blaming it all on Wilde. This dialogue also might remind readers of Wilde’s essays The Decay of Lying or The Critic as Artist . Act Five returns us to the Norfolk country house we entered in Act One. This chapter belongs to Constance. With a show of determination that surprises both Oscar and Bosie, she lays out her conditions to them regarding their future conduct. She proves to be every bit as eloquent in speech and as resolute in purpose as Oscar. Even readers who have studied Wilde, the tri als, and the doomed love for Bosie may be surprised by Con

stance’s ultimatum to her husband and the young man who stole his heart. Such an ultimatum may or may not be historically accurate; we will never know. But as an explanation of the affair and a preview of its aftermath, which did in fact involve an immedi ate rupture in their marriage and Constance’s departure, it can’t be too far off; sparks must have flown. In the end, what makes a historical novel believable is its ability to fill in the gaps, the private dramas, with stories that seem almost inevitable to ac count for what is known, and Bayard has proven himself to be a master at it.

Who’s Left on the Right?

I WAS A REPUBLICAN, but I never inhaled. I first voted in 1974, a time when many states had significant numbers of conservative Democrats, especially in the South, and also liberal Re publicans, anchored in the Northeast but scattered around the country, notably in the libertarian West. This expansive political landscape, before “Republican” and “reli

Republican politics and working behind the scenes is common in the book. The author also notes the double lives of such people as U.S. Representatives Bob Bauman and Jon Hinson, who seemed to think that they’d never get caught slurping congres sional staffers in restrooms or lurking in gay movie houses. Some, even today, dare us to speak the name of their love, e.g. for

A LAN C ONTRERAS

COMING OUT REPUBLICAN A History of the Gay Right by Neil J. Young Univ. of Chicago. 441 pages, $30.

gious Right” merged, endured for a while: as recently as Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991, a professional Black woman referred to herself as a Rockefeller Republican, more than a dozen years after the former Vice President’s death. This period of political overlap and increasing gay activism, roughly from the 1960s to the ’90s, is one of the transition times discussed in Neil J. Young’s smoothly written and exception ally well-researched look at gay Republicans then and now. The book begins earlier, with the lives of people, such as Dorr Legg, who were born in the interwar years. Legg and his cohort lived through the “lavender scare” of 1950s Washington, started some of the first gay rights organizations in California, and were ei ther killed by AIDS in their fifties and sixties or made it through to see some of our most important victories. We also see here the rise of scaremongers such as Florida’s Anita Bryant and the first whiff of theocrats rising from southern swamps. Gay people of my generation used to meet many civilized Republicans with whom one could have a nuanced discussion of public policy. One such, a gay man my age, first met me in the dim arcade of an adult bookstore in central Missouri. He was then serving on the staff of arch-conservative Governor John Ashcroft, later U.S. Senator and Attorney General in George W. Bush’s first administration. Why was he there (in the office; we know why he was in the arcade)? Because he was a very conservative Catholic. He just happened to like men. This is an example of what Mark Moran called “weird dissonances on the part of openly gay conservatives” in his review of James Kirchick’s Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington ( TheG&LR , July-August 2022). This theme of closeted gay men hovering in the shadows of Alan Contreras, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a writer and consultant living in Eugene, Oregon. November–December 2024

mer Republican Congressman Aaron Schock, first elected at age 27, who showed his congressional pecs in Men’s Health maga zine and generally acted uncatchable, eventually falling to a fi nancial scandal. Not that anyone was even a little surprised, but Schock finally came out officially in 2020. The number of Republican fundraisers, organizers, and rabble-rousers whose stories are told here is eye-opening, from buttoned-down lawyer and banker types to the decidedly unin hibited and probably unzipped Milo Yiannopoulos. Unexpected political relationships are revealed: even curmudgeonly Howard Jarvis, the author of California’s Proposition 13, met with gay conservatives and was glad to have them on board his anti-tax campaign. The most salient characteristic of gay Republican activists throughout the eighty-year period on which the book focuses is that they were all but universally white men. Young notes this throughout the book and points out the occasional nearly invis ible lesbian flitting across the stage, a bit out of place among the phalanx of upwardly-striving suits. Many of those on the Peter

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