Better luck next time: promising openly gay and lesbian candidates across the country fell by the wayside in 2004. Surprisingly, their sexuality was not an issue with voters.

Despite a banner year for out candidates in statewide and local elections, gay men and lesbians will have no more representatives on Capitol Hill than before the 2004 election cycle. Incumbents Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, both Democrats, and Jim Kolbe of Arizona, a Republican, will keep their seats, but other openly gay and lesbian candidates failed to survive a brutal primary season.

Yet none of the three most promising gay or lesbian candidates who weren't on the ballot on November 2 lost their primary because of some top-down culture of antigay bias. (Three were endorsed by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. A fourth didn't get the group's nod.) Instead, old-fashioned competition and exhaustion, factors apart from sexual orientation, ended their candidacies. In two cases, in fact, homophobia was not an issue; the district was so progressive, there was a crowded field clamoring for a spot on the Democratic ticket.

What emerges from the congressional battles of 2004, then, is a picture of gay and lesbian candidates who ran solid campaigns that weren't focused on sexuality at all. "These are hotly sought-after progressive seats," says the Victory Fund's Robin Brand, vice president of campaigns and elections. "That these candidates were gay was not really a factor. None had antigay attacks against them." They simply didn't win.

Take the case of Cathy Woolard in DeKalb County, on the outskirts of the city of Atlanta. In March, Democrat Denise Majette, an African-American woman, a Democrat, and the representative for Georgia's fourth district, declared that she would not be running for reelection to Congress. Woolard, a popular local political figure with seven years as Atlanta city council president on her resume, announced she would resign from the city council and run for Majette's seat. Unfortunately, Woolard, an out lesbian, wasn't the only one with designs on the suddenly open ticket. Liane Levitan, DeKalb's chief executive officer, quickly added her name to the slate competing in the Democratic primary. So did Cynthia McKinney, who represented the district for l0 years before losing to Majette in 2002 after making comments about President Bush and September 11 that were deemed incendiary.

Woolard believes that in a two-way race she might have nabbed the Democratic nomination--and in this heavily Democratic district, that would likely have meant the seat itself. "We raised almost half a million dollars in 100 days. That's really a lot," she says. The figure was a quarter-million dollars more than McKinney had raised. Woolard also garnered the coveted endorsement of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as the local alternative weekly. But McKinney had major name recognition, a history in the seat, and widespread support among African-Americans. She won the nomination in the July 20 primary without a runoff.

"Basically, Woolard and Liane Levitan split the white Democratic vote in the district, along with some crossover voters," says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Atlanta's Emory University. "Cynthia McKinney took the large majority of the black vote and probably a small slice of the liberal white vote, and that was enough to put her just over 50%. It's a tough district for any white candidate running against a well-known black candidate--especially in a Democratic primary. Woolard was very impressive in the debates and raised a substantial amount of money, but it wasn't enough to overcome the demographics of the district and a split in the anti-McKinney vote."

Sexuality? "Never an issue," says Woolard.

Like Woolard, state senator Tim Carpenter, a candidate for Congress from the fourth district of Wisconsin, picked up an early Victory Fund endorsement tiffs spring. Back in May the Victory Fund's Brand told the National Journal that Carpenter was one of their "top-priority candidates." "This is a great open-seat opportunity," she said, "and we're going to do everything we can for him." At the time Victory Fund had raised $15,000 for Carpenter and had planned an early-June fund-raiser in Washington, D.C.

The candidate was eager to become his state's second openly gay U.S. representative. "You have someone," Carpenter says, speaking of himself in the third person, "established in office for 20 years. So being openly gay is not an issue." The district is so heavily Democratic that all three Democratic candidates in the primary were unabashedly and vocally against the proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

But in a progressive district with an open seat, Carpenter met stiff competition from Gwen Moore, an African-American woman with the solid backing of EMILY's List, the powerful pro-choice political action committee. EMILY's List poured $600,000 into Moore's campaign. Moore, who will be the First African-American to represent Wisconsin in Congress, sewed up the Democratic primary. "In some ways I feel that I might have been meant to stay in the state senate to cover things," says Carpenter, pointing out that Wisconsin's effort to institute a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage will come up for debate in January. "I would have loved to have been the fourth out gay or lesbian in Congress, but it just didn't work out."

As for the other two? Mike Evans, a 25-year-old running for Dick Gephardt's seat in Missouri's third district, actually picked up an endorsement from comedian Margaret Cho, while the Victory Fund deemed his campaign a long shot. Yet having even a losing gay candidate on the slate (Evans told The Associated Press he was the first out candidate to run in a state-level race in Missouri) ensured that gay and lesbian issues were raised.

Jim Stork, a small-business owner and former mayor of Wilton Manors, Fla., didn't have a primary battle--he was the party's nominee for the 22nd district scat. Stork was a bright light for Democrats: He was given a coveted speaking position at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in July, and by early summer he had raised as much money, or more, than his Republican opponent, a 12-term incumbent. The blog Daily Kos raised $12,000 for Stork's cause. The Web site's correspondent called it "the coolest campaign [he'd] ever hung with." But in August Stork, who had campaigned aggressively all summer, abruptly took a sabbatical for medical tests. Though only 37, he was forced to pull out of the race entirely due to a heart condition. HIS Web site it now reads, "To say that I am disappointed is an understatement, so I will leave it at that."

Wildman is The Advocate's Washington correspondent.