Bedrooms and politics: as Americans become more forgiving, honesty may be the best policy when it comes to sex scandals ... even gay ones.

When U.S. representative Barney Frank heard the allegations that Bill Clinton had had an affair with a young White House intern, he must have felt a touch of empathy. The openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts was once embroiled in his own sex scandal, involving a young male prostitute who had launched an escort service out of the basement of Frank's Washington, D.C., town house. When Frank, who had a sexual relationship with the hustler, discovered the enterprise in 1987 -- the same year he made lbs sexual orientation public -- he threw the man out of his home.

Two years later the prostitute, Steve Gobie, went public with the story, plunging Frank into a scandal that many predicted would cost him his political career. But nine years later Frank has been reelected by his suburban Boston district four times and is one of the most powerful and highly regarded members of Congress.

How did he survive the scandal: "My defense was to tell the truth," Frank says. "I said I did a dumb thing, and people supported me because I leveled with them. People thought that I had done something wrong but that it shouldn't end my political career."

Similarly, the scandal involving Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky may not end Clinton's career prematurely, but the outrage directed toward the president has in some comers been explosive -- with gay men and lesbians absorbing some of the flak. For example, a newspaper columnist for the Bangor [Me.] Daily News has hinted that the Clinton sex scandal could have played a part in the February 10 people's veto that drove a stake through the heart of Maine's gay rights law.

In a column that ran the weekend before the vote, John Day quoted Christian Civic League of Maine executive director Mike Heath as saying there may be a subterranean "moral outrage" that could rum the vote into a referendum on the Clinton scandal. "My sense is, there is a backlash against this [sexually permissive] direction," Day quoted Heath as saying. Heath pointed to the Million Man March and groups such as the Promise Keepers as evidence of the reemergence of old-style family values.

Allegations of sex scandals like those lobbed at President Clinton are as old as the republic. Yet while Frank and other gay leaders in Washington are taking a wait-and-see approach to the White House scandals, they are acutely aware of the way in which sex allegations -- true and false -- have been used against gay men and lesbians in politics. Indeed, the practice of tarring your political opponents with allegations of homosexuality has an especially unseemly history.

"The notion of gays as subject to blackmail and therefore a danger to national security has figured in most gay political scandals until recent times," says David K. Johnson, the author of a forthcoming history of gay men and lesbians in the federal government. "The focus on blackmail in gay cases is similar to the focus on the perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges in the Clinton affair. In both cases the real concern is in sexual irregularities, but that concern is often justified in legalistic rhetoric. It's a way of trying to link the private spehere with affairs of the state."

In Johnson's book, tentatively titled Purge of the Perverts, he cites several historical examples. In 1940, for instance, Summer Welles, undersecretary of State in the Roosevelt administration, was rumored to have made sexual overtures to several male railroad porters. According to Johnson's book, after informal White House inquiry conrirmed the incidents, Roosevelt, a friend of Welles's, ordered a security detail to accompany Welles in public to avoid further hints of scandal. When Welles's political opponents threatened to go public with the information, Roosevelt reluctantly asked him to resign.

During the McCarthy era a decade later, thousands of gay and lesbian civil servants were dismissed when right-wing demagogues and other politicians claimed that the Truman administration, particularly the State Department, was riddled with "sex perverts" and "moral degenerates."

And in the midst of the 1964 presidential election, Walter Jenkins, a top aide to President Johnson, was arrested for having sex with another man in the rest room of a YMCA just blocks from the White House. When the story made headlines nationwide, the president's opponents charged that Jenkins, who was married and had children, was a national security risk because his sexual behavior made him vulnerable to blackmail. Jenkins eventually returned home to Texas, and Johnson went on to win in one of the largest landslides in American history.

Even after the idea that homosexuality made Politicians a heightened security risk was debunked, not all gay Politicians were as fortunate as Frank. Rep. Robert Bauman, a Republican from Maryland, was turned out of office in the early '80s after soliciting sex with an underage male prostitute. Bauman blamed his lack of discretion on alcoholism, but his antigay voting record made it difficult for gay rights activists to support him in his time of crisis. On the other hand, Rep. Gerry Studds, a Massachusetts Democrat, used an early-'80s scandal in which he admitted having sex with a 17-year-old male House page to publicly identify himself as a gay man. Voters rewarded his honesty with six subsequent re-elections. (studds retired in 1996.)

Bob Hattoy, an official with the Department of the Interior, says honesty is the best policy against smear campaigns. When Hattoy arrived in Washington in 1993 along with the largest group of openly gay and lesbian elected officials in history, he vowed that he would never try to hide his sex life. "As a gay man who is single and has sex, I'm very aware that any hint of sexuality in this town is titillating, especially to the right wing," he says. "That's why I'm the first to tell people about my life so that it can't be used against me. Everyone acts like a puritan, but this town is ripe with sexuality. People in politics are doing it with men and women, they are doing it with prostitutes. If hypocrisy could fly, this place would be an airport."

Paradoxically, the aftermath of the Clinton sex scandal indicates that it may reduce the damaging power of sexual rumor and innuendo in politics. Polls taken after the allegations became public indicate that the public has little interest in the private sex of the president as long as he did not encourage others to he about it under oath. "Americans are on the verge of a backlash against intrusive media coverage of people's private lives," says Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics. "They are tired of the overemphasis on sex over everything else. We are clearly moving toward a situation where what people do in their bedroom would be considered irrelevant to politics. As people understand more about the genetic roots of homosexuality, the sexual orientation of politicians will cease to be the hot-button issue it once was."

For the growing numbers of gay men and lesbians in politics, that would be welcome news indeed.