December 28th, 2014
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Closeted Anti-Gay Activist Dies of AIDS: 1986. Terry Dolan, who helped to found the National Conservative Political Action Committee, was pretty well known in elite gay circles. According to Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, when playwright Larry Kramer recognized him at a Washington, D.C. cocktail party, he walked up to Dolan and threw a drink is his face. “How dare you come here?” he shouted. “You take the best from our world and then do all those hateful things against us. You should be ashamed.”
Among those awful things was sending out fundraising letters for NCPAC, which claimed that “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).” Meanwhile, Dolan had, at the time of that 1984 encounter with Kramer, had just ended an affair with a male epidemiologist at the New York City Health Department, and was then enjoying everything the gay social scene had to offer.
Dolan knew how to raise money. “The “shriller you are,” he said in 1982, “the easier it is to raise money.” He had honed those skills at NCPAC, and during the late 1970s as part of the leadership of Christian Voice, a pre-Moral Majority right wing anti-gay group. And those skills he honed during those years have been the recipe for anti-gay activists ever since.
But four years later, Dolan himself was dead of AIDS at the age of 36. The following May, The Washington Post published an article about “the cautious closet” of Terry Dolan. His brother, Reagan White House speechwriter Anthony Dolan, was livid and took out a two-page ad in The Washington Times, arguing that “the greatest and most malicious falsehood in this story was its entire thrust, its basis: the claim that my brother lived and died a homosexual.” But Dolan did live and die a homosexual, and a deeply closeted one at that. But despite his brother’s and family’s best efforts, the secret was out, and no amount of wishful thinking otherwise would ever change that fact.
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Hunter
December 28th, 2014
Outing prominent anti-gay voices who are themselves gay is, for some reason that I can’t quite fathom, controversial. I’m with Mike Rogers on that one: I see it as a matter of calling them out for their hypocrisy, which we’re more than prepared to do in other areas.
I only wish that, with Dolan, it had happened sooner, and very publicly.
visitor
December 28th, 2014
I wonder: Does Anthony Dolan still hold to his belief that his brother was not a homosexual? I’d love to know.
Paul Douglas
December 30th, 2014
Just thinking the same thing visitor! Sounds like that whole family was pretty sicko. Maybe they’ve gotten well.
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