Dec 29, 2006  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J and JOSHUA LYNSEN & ELIZABETH PERRY | COMMENTS     

Having confined and defined much, if not most, of modern gay existence, “the closet” showed once again in 2006 that it is still a mighty force, albeit a shadow of its once powerful self.

In fact, some believe the closet is steadily inching toward irrelevance, as successive generations of gay and lesbian youth settle into their sexual orientation without first surrounding it with four walls of angst, denial, duplicity and shame.

Far from being a place that only harbors half-truths and paralyzing secrets, the 2006 version of the closet helped fuel best-selling memoirs and a breathtaking power shift in Congress. The closet opened its doors on the set of America’s most popular primetime television series and inside one of the nation’s most influential megachurches.

And whereas coming out of the closet was long considered social and professional suicide, in 2006 it proved anything but.

“Lance Bass coming out — it reminded us of the fact that he existed,” said David Ehrenstein, a gay writer and critic who was shocked that a member of a ’90s boy band announcing he is gay pulled front-page coverage in People magazine in 2006.

“Outside of Republicans, [the closet] is going to recede as more and more people are going to be out from day one so it won’t be an issue,” said Ehrenstein, author of “Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-1998.”

Celebrities like Neil Patrick Harris, aka “Doogie Howser, MD,” offered one of the feel-good coming out stories of the year, but the American public was also once again exposed to the darker side of the closet.

“People who weren’t living honest lives hurt a lot of people,” said Patrick Sammon, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay partisan group.

Sammon’s party was sent into a tailspin one month before the midterm elections when U.S. Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) abruptly resigned from Congress amidst allegations that he made sexual overtures to teenage male Capitol pages. Weeks later, conservatives were rocked by another gay sex scandal after Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was accused by a gay escort of having sex while high on crystal methamphetamine.

“Sadly, this just happens year, after year, after year — the closet, unfortunately, is an enduring reality,” said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. “2006 once again underscored the dangers of the closet … how it can warp and destroy people’s lives and careers.”

Politics of the closet

Foley’s sexually charged instant messages to young Capitol pages became one of the most shameful acts to emerge from the closet in 2006, but the congressman’s public fall also offered promising signs about how the American public deals with gay people coming out.

“The most negative thing about this year’s closet scandals was the association of Foley to the sexual exploitation of young people,” Foreman said. “The right wing went on an orchestrated campaign to repeat blood libel that gay men are prone to pedophilia.”

But that effort by conservatives to harp on Foley’s sexual orientation was unsuccessful because many voters believed “the way the Republican leadership mishandled it was really the issue here,” Sammon said.

Mark Shields, director of the Human Rights Campaign’s Coming Out Project, noted that polls taken in the wake of Foley’s resignation showed that “people really understood it wasn’t a gay issue that made Foley a scandal.

“There’s a bright white line in people’s mind between people who are gay and people who have dark demons,” Shields said. “I think it’s a sign of the times and how far we’ve come that the gay part of the Mark Foley story wasn’t the part that had the most legs.”

Foley’s coming out also revealed other characteristics of the modern closet: its appeal as an “escape hatch” to political figures in crisis (like former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who released his best-selling tell-all in 2006), and the various gradations of being in the closet that currently exist.

After years of the congressman refusing to confirm or deny reports that he was gay — including going so far as to hold a 2003 news conference insisting his personal life was no one’s business — Foley’s lawyer announced that “Mark Foley wants you to know he is a gay man,” within days of the congressional page scandal breaking.

Despite his best efforts to squelch rumors about his sexual orientation, Foley was widely considered an “openly closeted” politician, whereas few people seemed to have known about Ted Haggard’s double life before it was exposed by a gay male escort. The contrast displays the “different levels ...