Making Gay History by Eric Marcus

Author:Eric Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

CONFRONTED WITH the facts, the congressman decided he had no choice but to plead nolo contendere, which he did the day after Congress went out of session in October 1980.

I really thought I could contain the situation. It was all thought of in political terms, in terms of the election—that was the most important thing. Of course, for the next two weeks it was front-page news all over—not just in the Washington Post, but all over the world.

At home it was like being in a bomb shelter. I sat in the house for four or five days. Carol and I talked about it. We had a meeting of all our political leaders. They all came to the house. The consensus without objection from forty or fifty leaders in my district was, run! “Go out there and show them you’re the same old Bob Bauman.”

Ultimately I lost the election by less than two percentage points, about seven or eight thousand votes. I got more votes in losing than I had gotten in winning with sixty-five percent of the vote two years before. It was a presidential year, so there was a big turnout.

The defeat was a relief in one sense. This whole experience was like having root canal every day, twenty-four hours a day. And then suddenly, it stopped. But the following February or March, my wife told me she wanted a separation. When that news broke, the press was so intrusive that we had to take the kids out of town for about a week. There were more television units on the streets of Easton, Maryland, than there were people. It was absolute madness.

Eventually, the attention turned elsewhere. The spotlight moved on.

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