Jul 09, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

The voicemail came on a Thursday afternoon, in between busy committee meetings and at the end of a hectic week for Senate staffer Jonathan Tolman. It was a confusing message — the demands vague, the voice unidentified and unrecognizable.

The call had asked for “some updates” for an article involving Tolman, the staffer recalled, and left a number. Tolman simply assumed the caller wanted a revised version of a report on environmental policies he authored while working for a downtown Washington thinktank. As it turned out, that wasn’t the article in question.

Tolman, a senior aide for the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, chaired by conservative Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, was about to become the first Capitol Hill staffer publicly outed through a campaign led by two activists.

The “article” was a profile of Tolman three years ago in Metro Weekly, a local gay and lesbian magazine, a story that Tolman said he had long forgotten about.

“My appearance in the magazine was a mistake on my part, mostly because I didn’t know what it involved. I know now,” Tolman said.

After word of Tolman’s outing reached Inhofe, the senator’s office released a statement emphasizing that the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee employs Tolman, and not the senator personally.

“Senator Inhofe does not hire openly gay staffers due to the possibility of a conflict of agenda,” an official statement said.

The Human Rights Campaign gave Inhofe a “0” score during the last two sessions of Congress.

Tolman said he questioned the morality of the outing campaign.

“The agenda behind this outing seems to be kind of fascist. It says to me: Because you don’t subscribe to our personal idea, because you don’t choose to push sexual politics over environmental, we’re going to punish you.

“The senator knows I’m gay and it’s not changing his position and he’s not firing me. So my question to them is: Are you going to let it drop?”

20 offices said targeted
Not likely, say Mike Rogers and John Aravosis, the two men loosely heading an ongoing outing campaign on the Hill. As the date nears for a Senate vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban gay marriages in the Constitution, Rogers said the outings have picked up steam — from 13 documented offices to nearly 20 currently on a target list provided by Rogers to the Blade.

In addition to Tolman, Rogers and Aravosis, working in tandem but not together, claimed in the last week to have outed via the Web Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Republican Congressman Mark Foley of Florida.

While Tolman confirmed he is gay, the Mikulski’s office refused to comment on speculation she is a lesbian, something Aravosis implied last week on his site.

A spokesperson for Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) also declined to comment after Aravosis specifically asserted that Foley is gay on his Web site last week.

Both members of Congress have long been the subject of rumors about their sexual orientation.

Aravosis continued to defend the outing campaign.

“An acquaintance of mine, a Southern Republican, worked for a member who was not anti-gay personally, but he signed on to the amendment [banning gay marriage],” Aravosis said. “My friend quit. I’m basically saying, ‘You know what, you have a choice. It’s 2004. You can work for pro-gay Democrats, and now you can work for pro-gay Republicans.’”

Aravosis said he decided to target Mikulski after the 67-year-old senator, who has never married, declined for months to state her position on the Federal Marriage Amendment. The Washington Blade has made repeated requests for Mikulski’s position on the issue without a response until this week.

Within days after Aravosis claimed on his Web site that Mikulski is a lesbian, the Maryland Democrat issued a statement declaring her intention to vote against the amendment. But Mikulski’s staff declined to otherwise remark on any other aspect of the controversy, according to spokesperson Amy Hagovsky.

“A constitutional amendment is not about helping families. It is about helping George Bush get re-elected,” Mikulski said in a statement. “Congress has already spoken on this issue. There is a federal law — and state law in Maryland — that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. With our country at war in Iraq, we do not need a cultural war here at home.”

Signorile targets Mikulski
Mikulski was also targeted this week by gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile in the New York Press. Mikulski has been long besieged by questions about whether she ...