The gentleman from Maryland.

THE PROBLEM OF UNRULY SEX

I WRITE PROMPTED to do so at first by a most emphatic inviation by the author of this book. I was for several reasons reluctant to serve my old friend, and indeed agreed only contingently: I would first read the book, and then decide. Having read it I find myself grateful to the author for having invited me to write the foreword. I say this because he has done a great deal to clarify (advance?) my own thought on the questions raised in his autobiography. His book is especially useful to those of orthodox predispositions on many of the questions he raises. Whether the thinking he has finally catalyzed would serve as the satisfactory foundation of social policy on the problem of the homosexual I do not know.

There now, the use of the word "problem" must cause the author to groan in distress, if he believed that The Gentleman from Maryland is the instrument by which traditionalists will be disenthralled from superstitions respecting the diverse sexual appetities of the homosexual. He is entitled, particularly after the poignant and revealing work he has done in writing this book, to a non-formulaic explanation of the surviving dilemmas of those loyal to the heterosexual society.

Robert Bauman was born and raised under difficult circumstances. These I shan't describe, not wishing to deprive the reader of an introduction to Bauman's background executed so well by the author himself, who deals with it poignantly, comprehensively, and graphically, but never self-pityingly. We need only know that he suffered more than (one hopes) the average American boy, growing up, suffers, this being important to the narrative. Then came the exciting period as a page boy in Congress, during which he discovered his inflamed interest for politics. Then college days, followed by law school. He became prominent at a young age (he was Chairman of Young Americans for Freedom soon after it was founded). And during that hectic period he met a beguiling and endearing colleague-in-arms, Carol Dawson. They fell in love, married, and had four children.

We all knew superficially what he tells us about now in some detail. In 1980, his career as a congresman at high tide, he ran straight into the rocks. Whether it is true, or merely fancied, that he was the particularized target of the Speaker of the House does not matter in weighing the major questions Bob Bauman asks us to weigh. Whether it is true (I assume it is) that there were during the identical period a number of others (he mentions the figure nine) who served in the House of Representatives, and even in the Senate, who were detected by federal vice squads pub-crawling in search of fleeting homosexual encounters doesn't really matter. We do not doubt that Speaker O'Neill had a special animus against the young congressman who, by displaying on the floor a greater technical mastery of parliamentary detail, frequently upended the Speaker. What is important isn't that Bauman charges that he was victimized by being singled out for prosecution. What is important is that he never denies the truth of what was alleged, namely that he was in frequent (and usually drunken) contact with homosexuals, among them prostitutes and minors.

His first formal professional setback came when he was not forgiven by a crucial number of his constituents. Many of them stuck by him on hearing him plead guilty (in effect) and on being reassured by him that he suffered only from inclinations to homosexuality, to which he had given in under the influence of liquor, which he would no longer consume (to this day he does not drink). He further promised to consult a psychiatrist. The package was enough for many of his supporters, not enough for all.

And so, having lost his seat in Congress, he found himself desperate: What, now, would he do?

There was that public question; but there was also a very important private question. Gradually he discovered that his married life was coming irreversibly apart. On this point he is brutally candid, and earns one's special admiration. What he tells us is that he soon resumed his clandestine homosexual life, however discreetly. He does not tell us, and perhaps he couldn't do so, whether his wife could have absorbed the public and private shocks if he had succeeded in his short-lived attempt at homosexual celibacy, or even whether she was of a mind to do so. Nor is he censorious about Carol's leaving: It happened; and their beloved rustic home, in which the children had grown up, was in due course abandoned. He maintained (and still does, one gathers) affectionate relations with his children. But, for all intents and purposes, Robert Bauman was professionally and personally isolated.

He thought to make a political comeback in 1982, reasoning that broadened public attitudes on the matter of homosexuality would protect him from categorical proscription. But before the final date for filing a a primary candidate, the forces of opposition (of reaction?) persuaded him that if he persevered, he would suffer greatly from the ravages of a bitter campaign. So he pulled out.

At this point he found himself without a wife, without children, without a political career, with no prospects of a political career, with a rusty license to practice law, but without clients. And so he decided to write a book. Why? Because he needed the money, he says. We do not doubt that he needed the money, but do doubt that was the only reason for writing this book. Another reason being--one can't come away from these pages without concluding--a burning desire to tell the reader what it is like to have suffered such a fate as he suffered, and to ask whether it is right that this should happen to someone merely because he is born into this world with what we could agree to call "anomalous" sexual habits.

IT IS HERE that Bob Bauman runs into difficulties I judge to be insuperable.

Let us, without arguing, grant him his stipulation, namely that a substantial percentage of males are irreversibly bisexual in their appetites. Let us grant him, also, that the performance of his duties to his constituents was unaffected by his homosexual philandering. We could go further and say that we would grant that his role as father was fully played out, and even, to the extent we can realistically say this, that his role as husband was, if sexually attenuated, nevertheless not (obviously) entirely neglected. I hear him asking us, in this book, how we justify the residual cruelty, then, of punishing him as indeed we have done.

But we need to ask further questions, raise further points. During the months Robert Bauman submitted to psychiatric consultation, he was advised that his behavior was something of a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart. A cry for what? A cry, his psychiatrist said, to be apprehended, and exposed. How else account for a young congressman of rising prominence patronizing bars where he was bound to be recognized? How else account for his consorting with young professional homosexual prostitutes, one of whom wold almost inevitably attempt to blackmail him, as indeed happened?

Although the author divulges these pathological readings and indeed encourages us to acknowledges their plausibility (why, why would he destroy his own life?), he seems now to be going further. He seems to be telling us that he was really driven not only by the desire to end the hypocrisy of his life, giving up his career and his marriage, but perhaps by a deeper urge, namely to challenge the assumptions that would indeed wreck his life. Bob Bauman is a deeply convinced Christian, and one suspects that the prophet's calling appeals to him, as indeed it would appeal to any man who seeks extra-suicidal explanations for suicidal behavior.

But this reader rejects the prophet. The problem raised by Robert Bauman survives his rendition of it, survives even one's contempt for so many of the unwonted and even sadistic cruelties to which he was subjected.

If we are required not to employ the word the homosexual community most abhors, namely "normal," we are driven to a rather exhausting search for an alternative that explains the conduct of the homosexual, the locus classicus here being Robert Bauman, the gentleman from Maryland.

EXPERIENCED and thoughtful men and women acknowledge the compelling character of the sexual creature that resides in all of us. But the next question has got to be the critical one, namely, Is that sexual drive undeniable? It is only a beginning to say the obvious, that the sexual drive is more pronounced in some than in others; that indeed in some, who are termed asexual, it is hardly there at all. But even if we reduce to a small minority those in whom the sexual drive is there in typhoon force, still we need to ask: Is it undeniable? If it were precisely that--undeniable--a case for social quarantine would certainly commend itself. Homosexuals, if they are to be judged by the same standards as others, must be divided between those whose drive is deniable, and those whose drive is not deniable.

And even then, further refinements are in order. Monogamous homosexuality is--orderly. Orderly in a sense that is more basic merely than reaching out for a quirky discretion dictated by social orthodoxy. Then there is something which, for failure to find alternative wording, one might call the disorderly homosexual. What I hear from the author of this book is that some strains of homosexuality are, really, not deniable: that the effort to deny them imposes monastic disciplines these few cannot, at the risk of damaging their emotional health, impose upon themselves. And that therefore the primacy of this undeniable sex drive has got to be understood, and social conventions need to accommodate themselves to it.

But even to acknowledge that such a drive is undeniable, that it claims, among those it afflicts, a priority higher than any other--higher than the maintenance of monogamous standards of social life, higher than the vows exchanged at the altar with the woman one takes as wife, higher than one's understanding of what it means to contribute to the delinquency of a minor: To understand all of that in the sense of making way for it is what society declines to do. A congressman from Massachusetts was recently re-elected notwithstanding that he confessed to having had a sexual encounter with a page. The congressman apologized: but restricted the apology to his having had sex with someone under age--someone, moreover, who served in the House of Representatives, under the paternal wing, broadly understood, of its Members. Even if we grant that different sections of the country will react differently to different assaults on orthodoxy, we have got to distinguish between the cases of Congressman Studds and Congressman Bauman, if the understanding is correct that Congressman Studds faced his constituency and said simply: I am a homosexual who sinned in consorting with a page. The author of this book seems to be saying: I am a congressman with unruly homosexual appetites, and I ask that you not take these into consideration, that instead you should focus exclusively on the labors I have performed while in Congress. I understand Mr. Bauman to be asking that society countenance not merely homosexuality (which request I deem reasonable) but undeniable self-indulgence in the exercise of homosexuality.

Perhaps I am wrong. It is conceivable that the author will think I have misread his book. indeed it is conceivable that that is what I have done. In which event this introduction serves only the purpose of alerting other readers to the question this reader found himself confronted with. Whether other readers see that as the principal question raised, and if so, whether they answer that question as I do, or as I do not, they will not think themselves abused for having been invited to read The Gentleman from Maryland. It is written by an attractive man of quick wit and appealing temperament. Moreover, he takes us into corners of the mind, and into secret places in modern life, which we ought to know about. It is hardly an appeal to lubricity that animates those candid sections of this book in which the author shows us what it is like to live the exciting agony of the failed heterosexual. Bob Bauman takes us home with him, he treats us decently and with respect, and I for one thank him sincerely for his hospitality, from which I have profited.