Brock in the hot seat: after catching hell for vilifying the private lives of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, gay onetime conservative David Brock takes on his former friends on the right. (People).

David Brock doesn't fit the part of political firebrand. Over lunch at a busy Washington, D.C., Starbucks, he is shy and soft-spoken, his carefully chosen words nearly drowned out by the clamor of the crowd.

Yet this unassuming figure, clad in a leather jacket and jeans, is the same right-wing journalist who assumed a great deal about some of his subjects, labeling Anita Hill, for instance, "a little nutty, a little slutty." Brock made the allegation in the conservative American Spectator magazine in 1991, shortly after Hill testified before the Senate that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Brock's book on the episode, The Real Anita Hill, became a best-seller.

Two years later, writing in the same magazine, Brock broke the "Trooper-gate" story that sparked Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against President Clinton and fueled one of the ugliest sex scandals in American political history, culminating in Kenneth Starr's lurid report and Clinton's impeachment trial.

But after coming out publicly in 1994, Brock began to have second thoughts about his role as the right wing's leading scandalmonger, especially as a gay man. In a spectacular break with the Right, he apologized publicly to Clinton (in a 1998 open letter published in Esquire) and privately to Hill (in a 1998 letter written to her). He also berated his ex-colleagues and friends for their antigay attitudes and mean-spirited politics. Then he sat down to write a book about the experience, spending the past three years tracing exactly where he--and the conservative movement--went wrong.

Nearing his 40th birthday, Brock lives today in Washington's Georgetown section with his partner, James Alefantis, who manages a nearby restaurant. The Advocate spoke to Brock about ant]gay politics, the state of his personal life and controversial career, and his new book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

What sparked your epiphany?

There was no single incident. I just grew increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the right. I remember spending time in Arkansas researching articles and finally understanding that a lot of what conservatives were saying about Clinton was invented. The more I was exposed to the Clinton haters, the more turned off I became. I could see that they were just bigots on many fronts.

How much of it had to do with your sexual orientation?

In retrospect, a fair amount. Certainly, a straight person could be in the same position and have the same moral objections to the Right. But I had an additional conflict going on. The Christian right was a big part of the conservative world I was propping up. And the Christian right was saying the worst possible things about gay people. At the time, I wasn't actively aware of the conflict. I guess I was in denial. I didn't want to face what it meant about my career and my life. But now I can see it clearly.

You write in your book that you came out in The Washington Post because you feared being outed in the gay press. How did your colleagues react to your revelation?

There were less than a handful of negative reactions. If I was going to do their work for them, then the revelation I was gay could be overlooked, at least for the time being. I was later told that as a gay man, I could never stay on the right over the long haul, because there were many who were uncomfortable with the fact that I'd outed myself. It just wasn't said directly to me.

One way of reading your odyssey from left to right to somewhere in the middle is that you are simply contrarian. Why should anyone believe you now?

I do see the initial appeal of conservatism at Berkeley [the University of California, Brock's alma mater] was contrarianism. I relished the role of a renegade back then. But I don't see it in anything I'm saying or doing now. I took me a long time, longer than it should have, to stop looking at things in black-and-white tenus. I think I'm unlikely to fall into that pattern again. I'm not nearly as adamant that I'm right about anything anymore.

Since your break with the right wing, have you seen any progress among its leaders on gay rights?

In the last couple election cycles, even though there has been no substantive shift, the gay bashing has not been as blatant as it was, say, 10 years ago. But I think that there are episodes, like what Jerry Falwell said after September 11, that show how the Right really thinks.

There's a colorful scene in the book where you describe running around Badlands [a Washington gay bar] with Laura Ingraham, a well-known conservative commentator with an antigay past. She later wrote a column supporting her gay brother. Did you have anything to do with her renunciation of antigay politics?

I helped her write the column. I'm not sure it was a change of heart. She had gotten some bad press in Vanity Fair about her past and wanted to deal with that reputation. I never really felt that younger conservative crowd, the non-religious right crowd, was antigay. Younger, more hip members of the Right don't want the baggage of the religious right. I always found it hard to tell--and I was this way too--what conservative activists believed and what they were merely parroting. There was a lot of groupthink or party line and not a lot of independent thinking.

Describe your gay life in the conservative closet.

It was mostly surreptitious bar crawling. When I was writing the Hillary book [The Seduction of Hillary Rodham], I had a ritual of going to Tracks [a former D.C. gay dance club] late every Saturday night. I barely talked to anyone. I was looking for some kind of camaraderie but couldn't achieve it. I was extremely isolated, both politically and emotionally. I was always very concerned about being found out, especially when I started working at the [conservative think tank] Heritage Foundation in 1990.

Were you ever confronted? Did you ever get a drink in the face at a gay bar?

When my profile increased after the Anita Hill book, I stopped going out as much to avoid that fate. By a certain point I knew that by attacking Clinton, I was doing work basically contrary to the civil rights of gay people. So I kept a low profile. The most that ever happened was a one-night stand here or there. I'd rush the guy out in the morning so I didn't have to talk about politics or what I did for a living.

How has your revelation gone over among more liberal friends or colleagues?

Mixed. Lots of people only remember the early work and haven't heard any about my confession or recantation. Some people know the whole story and, not knowing me, feel my transformation is insincere. And there are some people who--and rightly so--feel I can't apologize enough. The Anita Hill part of my career is a much harder thing to get over than the Clinton stuff. It so divided this city. There are still people who feel that anything I say about it now is too little too late. And I understand that, and they may well be right.

Why do many liberals and many gays have a hard time accepting your conversion? Haven't you done exactly what they wanted by renouncing your ties to the antigay right?

History is full of ideological defections that have gone the other way, from liberal to conservative. The conservative movement generally cheers defectors or party-switchers. They understand the value of propaganda in a way that liberals often don't. Conservatives have a chip on their shoulders, so anyone who renounces a liberal past is seen as a huge deal. Whereas liberals, who are generally more confident in their views, their attitude is, "Well, what took you 40 years to figure out what we knew all along?" It's a fair question.

Imagine running into Clinton today. What would you say to him?

I'd be pretty cautious, because even though I've publicly apologized for the Troopergate piece, I'm sure he has mixed emotions about me. If I were him, I know I'd have mixed emotions about me. I would let him take the lead. I would certainly be willing to apologize again.

You thank Barney Frank and [Human Rights Campaign director] Elizabeth Birch in your book. Have gay people embraced your coming-out?

Barney was someone who encouraged me to think about what I was doing early on. He has a strong moral voice about being true to yourself. I don't know how much Elizabeth knows about my story, but she was very warm to me at a time when not a lot of people were. There was a period of a year or so when I had lost all my friends on the right wing and I didn't know anyone else. When I wasn't as critical of Hillary Clinton [in his biography of her] my friends just cut me off. Elizabeth was a sympathetic ear.

After spending years in the antigay right, do you feel a need to prove your bona fides to gay people?

I don't know if proving myself is the way to put it. But advocacy for gay causes could be something in my future. I want to live the values I have now but not to make anyone like me more.

In 1999 you profiled prominent GOP figure Michael Huffington in Esquire. In the story, he talked for the first time about his gay life. Was that a foray into gay social issues for you?

I didn't think about it that way at the time, but I guess in retrospect it was. It was dealing with a very public person's struggle with his sexual identity. He didn't want the word gay used in the piece, but of course the magazine used it in the headline, so he was pretty unhappy about it. It was a sad, tragic article, and he wanted to see things in a sunnier way. Everything led me to the conclusion that he was gay, but he didn't want to take that final step. I thought I was helping, and I'm sorry it didn't turn out that way for him.

You were friendly with his ex-wife, Arianna?

We spent a fair amount of time together in Washington. When the Clinton book came out, they threw a party for me. But from what I understand, she was not happy about the Esquire piece either. As a condition of writing that article, Michael had me agree that I would not go to Arianna about it. He wanted to be the one to tell her. He didn't fulfill his end of the bargain, and she heard about his bisexuality or whatever from a reporter. I haven't talked to her, but I assume she holds me somewhat responsible.

In the book, you describe Armstrong Williams, an antigay talk show host, coming on to you. Is that outing, and have you heard from him?

I haven't gotten a letter from him disputing what I said. [Laughs] I did grapple with it, because the book is careful about not engaging in blanket outings. But this was based on my own experience with him, and if you dispute this, you could dispute everything in the book. I did go back and forth on this, partly because it felt like the outing of Clinton's personal life, which I now feel was the wrong thing to do. But I decided that I felt that I had to come up with my own standards, and I would have left Armstrong alone if he was not so vociferously antigay.

Some of your portraits of your ex-colleagues feel like a poke in the eye more than just criticism.

I guess that's because it's about their character, not just their politics. I'm not trying to settle any scores, and it feels like after three years of working on this book, all that is finally washed out of my system. I've let go of it. Once I left the conservative movement, the realization I had was, those days were not about being a true believer. I never was a true believer in the conservative cause. There was no real philosophical commitment to it. I came to it in a shallow, reactive way. It was partly about a career, it was partly about gaining a sense of identity. Now it feels like coming back to where I always was. I feel like I'm finally at peace.

What role has your relationship with James played in this process of finding yourself?.

One of the main reasons the break with the Right occurred is that I don't think I would have been able to find a happy relationship living that way. I would have been afraid of any attachment. It has given me a second chance at a fairly advanced age to date again seriously. Earlier, in addition to the politics, I didn't know how to be mutual with another human being. I had a single-minded focus on my career and myself. I had never really learned what love and friendship are all about. What I've found in James is a mutual love in the sense of giving and receiving.