Jul 23, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

The man heading up the effort by Republicans to keep control of the United States Senate is the latest gay politico to be outed by local activists.

Jay Timmons, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, declined comment this week on efforts to publicize his sexual orientation. But a spokesperson for the NRSC, Dan Allen, said that the committee has a policy of nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

“We hire the people who we think have the best abilities for this job and these campaigns,” he said. “We represent a wide variety of views in candidates, and we don’t expect staffers to be ideologically aligned with them all.”

Timmons got his NRSC post because his boss, Virginia Sen. George Allen, was named to head the GOP group in 2002. Timmons had been Allen’s chief of staff in his Senate office and also worked for the conservative Republican when he was Virginia’s governor.

Allen announced his support for the Federal Marriage Amendment in the weeks leading up to a Senate vote on the measure, which would change the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage. Republican leaders used their majority control of the Senate to bring the FMA to a vote and have vowed to do so again.

The NRSC, headed by Timmons, has the single responsibility to ensure the election of Republican candidates to the Senate and has declared its intention to seize upon the issue of same-sex marriage to motivate conservative voters to unseat congressional Democrats.

Minutes after the results were tallied on the amendment’s roll call vote last week, Republican Senate candidates in the South and West sent out angry statements through the NRSC proclaiming the end of marriage should Democrats take control of Congress.

Local gay activist Michael Rogers, who has led the effort to out gays working for conservative politicians, has compared Timmons to the late Roy Cohn, the high-profile gay attorney who started his career as an aide to former anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy.

“What this community is saying is that we will no longer tolerate the Roy Cohns of the world,” Rogers said. “We’re talking about gay men working for homophobes in the day, raising money for them and advocating their policies, and then going to the bars at night. Jay Timmons is a Roy Cohn.”

Anti-gay mentor
Allen, Timmons’ political mentor, scored a 14 on the Human Rights Campaign scorecard for the 107th Congress, credited only with establishing a written non-discrimination policy for his own staff.

Timmons, who also sits at the helm of the Republican Presidential Task Force, last spring attended a Heritage Foundation reception for a group of students from Regent University, a Christian graduate school founded by Pat Robertson.

Alongside anti-gay Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.), the author of the FMA, Timmons gave a detailed presentation on the most contentious Senate races in the country and the NRSC’s strategy for winning them.

An instrumental figure in Allen’s career since his 2000 bid for Senate, Timmons has served as Allen’s campaign manager, spokesperson, chief of staff and now his representative at the NRSC.

Some say, in an extended olive branch to Virginia gay residents, Timmons arranged the then-Senatorial candidate’s 2000 controversial meeting with the Log Cabin Republican Club of Northern Virginia, in which he promised to “keep an open door toward their concerns.”

But that move didn’t give Timmons amnesty from the activists’ current campaign, said John Aravosis, who along with Rogers is heading up the effort to out gays they believe are working against the interests of gay people.

“Even if [Timmons] didn’t truly believe in all of the committee’s stances, he can’t just get by with a nudge, nudge and a wink, wink, anymore,” said Aravosis, who is himself a former staff attorney himself for anti-gay Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

No end to outings
What started as a personal battle against the Federal Marriage Amendment on Capitol Hill has now developed into an indefinite crusade to “expose more homophobes inside the gay community,” Rogers said this week.

Rogers and Aravosis have been using their Web sites to out closeted members of Congress who support the FMA and their gay staff members.

On his Web site this week, Rogers called on supporters to follow his lead on these outings.

“If you are like me, you’re probably wondering: How, in America, in 2004, can an openly gay man live with himself while he works to elect those that would ensure second-class citizenship upon his own community?” Rogers wrote.

He then ...