Republican Gomorrah Read online

  “I knew I didn’t belong behind that podium at the CNP, gazing out at Phyllis Schlafly’s beehive hairdo,” Brock wrote in his devastating 2002 tell-all memoir Blinded by the Right. “What no one in the room that night at CNP knew was that had I spent my Saturday night in Washington, I would have been prowling through the dark corridors of gay dance clubs . . . I was now, as Marvin Liebman had referred to himself earlier, a Jew in Hitler’s army. Knee deep in this profound moral conflict, I wouldn’t recognize it, for recognizing it would have forced me to question my own beliefs and discover my own self-loathing. I was only interested in self-promotion.”

  Brock’s ambition was fatally damaged days later, when an anonymous letter describing his patronizing of Badlands, a DC gay bar, was circulated to gossip magazines. As rumors spread through Beltway political circles, and gay newspapers threatened to out Brock, he decided to come out. At that point, his motives were wholly cynical. “Overnight,” Brock wrote, “I became the only openly gay conservative in the country. I prepared myself to use my presence in the movement to help the movement deflect legitimate criticism that it was anti-gay.” Brock remained aligned with the conservative movement, drawing a paycheck from The American Spectator, for three more years, until he realized that the “friends” who stood behind him made exceptions to their anti-gay philosophies only because they saw him as a useful tool. Brock learned, for example, that the neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol, who privately encouraged him after he came out, had spoken at a conference promoting “ex-gay” therapy.

  Brock’s final rift with the movement came in 1996 when he wrote a biography of Hillary Clinton that challenged the right’s cartoon-like stereotype of the First Lady as a megalomaniacal criminal. Under withering fire from his erstwhile friends, who condemned him as a traitor to their cause, he responded with a dramatic article for Esquire titled, “David Brock, the Road Warrior of the Right, Is Dead.” Completing what he described as his “spiritual and moral conversion,” Brock wrote letters of apology to people he believed he had unjustly hurt, from Anita Hill to Bill Clinton.

  The anger of his former conservative friends rose to a fever pitch. Anti-feminist pundit Barbara Ledeen vowed to “firebomb” his home, a half-serious threat that typified the response of conservatives to Brock’s break from their ranks. Meanwhile, many on the left doubted the sincerity of his conversion and were reluctant to welcome him after the havoc his writings had visited on them. Even though he had risked everything to regain his personal integrity, Brock’s future was uncertain.

  In 2004, Brock founded Media Matters for America, now one of the progressive movement’s flagship organizations. The group, where I have worked as a researcher, is the realization of his tireless effort to create a counterweight to the conservative movement’s efforts to influence the media. In the four years since its foundation, Media Matters has extensively reported on the distortions and hate speech spouted by conservative and other media figures. Top-rated radio jock Don Imus’s defaming of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s,” a comment that ignited a firestorm of controversy and temporarily cost him his job, might have gone unnoticed had Media Matters not recorded and reported his remark as soon as he made it.

  Bill O’Reilly of Fox News has reacted with predictable displeasure to the unprecedented level of scrutiny he has received from Brock’s researchers, describing Media Matters as “the most vicious element in our society today,” a group staffed by “assassins.” In March 2008, O’Reilly fumed about the organization’s reporting of racially charged remarks he had made after visiting a restaurant in Harlem, when he confessed surprise that black patrons of the restaurant acted civilly, like people in “an all-white suburb,” and did not shout, “M-f ’er, I want more iced tea!” “I want Media Matters deported,” O’Reilly barked. “And if anybody can work that—if Barack Obama can work that—I’m voting for him. OK?”

  For many of those on the right beset by private trauma, it is far easier to seek shelter in an authoritarian movement than to do what Brock did—that is, to stand alone against extreme cultural and political pressures, and without any promise of finding a community for psychological support. This is especially true for gay men, who risk social castigation and even physical violence for leading an open lifestyle. It is no wonder that authoritarian personalities such as Jeff Gannon are so much more common than those who, like David Brock, follow a path to authenticity.

  The contrast between the journeys of David Brock and Jeff Gannon is instructive on the byways of the right—and the confrontation between them became one of the critical episodes of conservative media in the Bush era. Who is Gannon? For one brief shining moment, during President George W. Bush’s second term, he was the most well-known reporter that nobody knew. Without any journalistic credentials or track record in politics, Gannon suddenly surfaced with the title of Washington bureau chief for Talon News, a mysterious website operated by the conservative public relations group GOPUSA. Despite his utter lack of professional qualifications, and despite the fact that the Senate and House press galleries had rejected his requests for credentials, Gannon breezed through a White House security check, scoring a front-row seat in the press briefing room. When President Bush called on him at a January 26, 2005, press conference, Gannon delighted the embattled president by ripping into the congressional Democrats. “How are you going to work with people [like the Democratic leadership] who are so divorced from reality?” Gannon asked. “Continue to speak to the American people,” Bush replied.

  With that question, Gannon gained instant celebrity. Reporters in the pressroom noticed that he had a pattern for lobbing softball questions to the White House press secretaries and briefers. While they gossiped among themselves, Brock deployed his Media Matters researchers to investigate. In February 2005, Media Matters revealed that Gannon’s real name was James Dale Guckert and that he had literally cut and pasted entire White House press releases into several of his own articles. Guckert was an obvious fraud. But, then, who was Gannon really? And how did he make a living before his short career as a fake reporter?

  On his own website, conservativeguy.com, Gannon presented himself as just another earnest and aspiring Republican activist. In his headshot, he appeared in a suit and tie, seated at an office desk before a stack of books. He wore a serious, even intense, look on his face. But his actual biography told a different story—that of a drifter who had endlessly and effortlessly changed jobs and identities to suit the constantly shifting demands of what appeared to be a very unstable life. “I’ve been a preppie, a yuppie, blue-collar, green-collar and white-collar,” Gannon wrote. “I’ve served in the military, graduated from college, taught in the public school system, was a union truck driver, a management consultant, a fitness instructor and an entrepreneur. I’m a two-holiday Christian and I usually vote Republican because they most often support conservative positions.”

  For those trying to clarify Gannon’s murky personal history, it seemed apparent that he was much more than a “two-holiday Christian.” Lurid rumors filtered through Washington, DC’s gay community that several tenacious gay bloggers soon confirmed: Gannon had worked for years as a high-priced male prostitute, advertising himself as a hypermasculine ex-Marine on the website militarystud.com, where he hawked the use of his “weapon,” which he described as “8 inches cut,” for $200 an hour. Gannon, who had never served in the Marines but only played one as a prostitute, lashed out at the bloggers with harsh anti-gay rhetoric, denouncing them as “radical gay activists” guilty of “hyper-hysterical homosexual hypocrisy.”

  As the press began to scrutinize the content of Gannon’s articles, the Washington Post reported that somehow he had mysteriously gained access to highly sensitive CIA documents. In an October 2003 interview with Joseph Wilson, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Gannon referred to a confidential memo that identified Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent. Bush’s deputy chief of staff and senior political
adviser Karl Rove, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and other members of the Bush administration circulated this document to a few chosen reporters days later, hoping to punish Wilson for his accurate and damaging claim, which he had reported to the CIA before the invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. But for some reason, Gannon had that document in his possession first. In February 2005, Democratic Representatives Louise Slaughter and John Conyers wrote to independent prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who had been appointed to investigate the leak of Plame’s identity, demanding to know how Gannon procured the CIA memo. After the conviction of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice, Fitzgerald’s investigation effectively ended without providing an answer to their query, and Gannon has not cleared up the mystery.

  The Washington press corps besieged Gannon with questions about his relationship to the White House and his suspect journalistic methods. How had he gained constant access to the White House pressroom without a proper credential? Who in the White House had waved him through the Secret Service’s gates? In an attempt to fend off reporters’ suspicions, Gannon pointed to a rousing defense of his ethics by the hysterically homophobic columnist Ann Coulter. “Gannon has appeared on television and given a series of creditable interviews in his own defense, proving our gays are more macho than their straights,” Coulter opined. But her declaration of support only added to Gannon’s infamy. Talon News disappeared from the Web almost as quickly as it appeared, and Gannon faded away, too, toiling on the far fringes as a blogger.

  After his outing, Gannon made an appearance before a panel of gay rights activists, where he conceded that he was “absolutely” gay. But he remained conflicted about his identity. “If I talk to Jeff about a lot of gay issues, he freaks—he can’t go there,” a friend of Gannon’s told Vanity Fair. “Jeff never stood in front of the mirror, he doesn’t think he’s part of the gay community, and he doesn’t think what he’s done affects the gay community. The guy at the end of ‘American Beauty’—that’s Jeff. He can’t come to terms with who he is.”

  Gannon’s hypocrisy on gay issues persisted. He filled his blog posts with anti-gay vitriol, decrying “the major media’s pro-gay slant,” and sniping at “judicial activists” seeking to undermine “traditional marriage.” At the same time, he continued his desperate attempt to morph into a Middle American Everyman, blaming his downward career spiral on anti-Christian bias. “I’m everything people on the Left seem to despise,” he claimed. “I’m a man who is white, politically conservative, a gun-owner, an SUV driver and I’ve voted for Republicans . . . Most importantly, I’m a Christian. Not only by birth, but by rebirth through the blood of Jesus Christ.”

  Cable news networks, newspapers, and major bloggers had broadcast the details of his double life to millions of Americans, yet Gannon reacted as though they were reporting on a complete stranger. In his mind—and perhaps only in his mind—he was just another “conservative guy.” Like Luigi Pirandello, the Italian author who won an international audience through the beneficence of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (a figure he privately detested even as he donated his Nobel Prize medal to be melted into scrap metal to support Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia), Gannon had become a tragic example of personal disassociation. “There is somebody who’s living my life,” Pirandello lamented in a diary entry before his death in 1936. “And I know nothing about him.” Could not James Guckert have said the same thing about Jeff Gannon?

  In the aftermath of the Gannon incident, another mysterious figure, Matt Sanchez, materialized instantly as an icon of the conservative movement. He too seemed to be the product of an immaculate political conception. And like Gannon, who had never been a soldier but played one on the Internet, Sanchez presented himself as the ideal of the hyper-male culture of the U.S. Marines. An inactive reservist trained in refrigeration mechanics, the thirty-six-year-old high school dropout described his military service in terms of personal transcendence. “Joining the Marines was a bit like a religious experience,” Sanchez said. “You’re constantly placed under enormous pressure and often your only way of being ‘saved’ is turning toward the Marine method. Honor, Courage, and Commitment are the 3 commandments.”

  By 2007, Sanchez was attending Columbia University as a commuter student—an anonymous figure on campus distinguished only by his hulking physique and gray, tight Marines t-shirts. Suddenly, after a fracas at the school broke out between anti-war protesters and campus military recruiters, Sanchez rocketed to conservative star status. In an article for the Columbia student newspaper, he alleged that while he was promoting the Marines on campus, a group called the International Socialist Organization shouted epithets labeling him a “baby-killer” and “stupid minority” (Sanchez is Puerto Rican). Although the incident was thoroughly investigated by Columbia and never confirmed, Sanchez was shuttled to the Fox News sets of Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor to recount his horror story. Right-wing bloggers amplified his tale with righteous indignation, and the New York Post solicited him for hot exposés on the anti-Americanism of Columbia’s latte liberals.

  In honor of his courage in the face of liberal bigotry, Sanchez was presented with the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award at the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference, a massive annual gathering of right-wing activists that included appearances by Vice President Dick Cheney and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. Basking in his fifteen minutes of fame, Sanchez had his photo snapped with Newt Gingrich and posed for a beaming portrait with Ann Coulter, who had called Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards “a faggot” minutes earlier. Sanchez even brushed shoulders for a moment with Jeff Gannon. When he posted photos of himself with these conservative idols on his personal blog that same evening, a light went on. A popular gay blogger named Andy Towle recognized Sanchez from a date he said they went on in 1999.

  The following morning, photos spread like poison ivy across the Web depicting the muscle-bound Sanchez in action during his prior career as a gay porn actor. His screen names alternated between Rod Majors and Pierre LaBranche. Most of the photos showed Sanchez acting in one or another of the forty-five classics he starred in, including Beat Off Frenzy, Touched by an Anal, and Tijuana Toilet Tramps. Towle and other gay bloggers pointed to a still-active Web page, ExcellentTop. com, where Sanchez had apparently advertised himself as a $200-an-hour male escort. Sanchez attempted to block public access to this site but failed when bloggers dredged up a cached version.

  Finally Sanchez came out, in a sense, in a confessional piece for the popular liberal Web magazine Salon.com. In it, he claimed his porn career made him feel “disgusted” with himself, stuck on a constant “emotional low,” and convinced that “the people who surrounded [him] were like drug dealers.” Sanchez’s disillusionment stoked his attraction to backlash conservatism. “I didn’t like porn’s liberalism,” Sanchez said. “In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is magnified.” Repelled by “liberalism,” Sanchez explained that he was transformed into “a 100 percent flag-waving red-blooded Reagan Republican.”

  Now that he was a “conservative guy,” Sanchez claimed to have instantly exorcised his homosexual tendencies. “I don’t consider myself gay or a member of the gay community,” he told an interviewer from Radar magazine. “Have I ever been gay? No,” Sanchez added for emphasis. “Have I had sex with men? Obviously.” On his personal website, Sanchez claimed to have two girlfriends, then said he was married, and then retracted that claim after bloggers challenged him to produce a marriage license.

  Then, just like Gannon, Sanchez projected his self-loathing onto homosexuals. “Gay men are like fundamentalist Muslims. If you leave their religion they have to send out a fatwa and demand your execution,” Sanchez complained. Conservative gay-bashers were delighted by the Marine’s impassioned denunciations and denials. “Cpl. Sanchez, it was an honor to meet you and a privilege to know you,” wrote Michelle Malk
in, a nationally syndicated right-wing commentator who posed for a photo with Sanchez at CPAC, in a lengthy defense of the “corporal” on her blog.

  I, too, had the honor of meeting Sanchez at CPAC, and I described the encounter in an article for the Huffington Post. I noted that he was introduced to me by David Horowitz, a veteran conservative operative and former Communist agitator of the New Left, as the best and brightest in his campaign against college anti-war groups, or, as he called them, “campus fascists.” The next day, I appeared on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss Sanchez’s outing in the context of the right’s anti-gay politicking. When I returned home that night, I discovered an e-mail in my inbox. It was from Cpl. Matt Sanchez and consisted of a single sentence: “So do you have a crush on me or what?” Days later I learned that Sanchez had created a Wikipedia page about me, falsely identifying me as a homosexual. Then I understood why I had been suddenly deluged with e-mails from gay political junkies inquiring about my relationship status.

  Even though I didn’t respond to Sanchez, he took the liberty of adding me to his mailing list. I was now able to track his journey. I learned that he had been discharged from the Marines and embedded as a blogger with troops in Iraq with the express mission of providing pro-war coverage. In his dispatches he accused nonembedded reporters of harboring secret terrorist sympathies, claiming, in an article for the National Review in July 2007, that the press had waged “a very cunning strategy to win an asymmetrical war” against the United States. Sanchez’s war cheerleading also appeared routinely in WorldNetDaily , a far-right Web magazine that had published an exhaustive four-part series headlined “Soy is making kids ‘gay.’”

  In an interview with Randy Thomas, a “former” homosexual serving as vice president of a self-described “ex-gay” ministry, Exodus International, Sanchez vehemently insisted that he had never been gay. He lashed out at the “gay fundamentalists” who outed him, likening them to pedophiles. “The bulk of the gay fundamentalists,” he fumed, “the anti-religious, the pro-abortionist constituents—these are the people who feel you’re ‘born that way.’ By that token, child molesters are just born that way and should be ‘forgiven’ for just doing what comes natural.”