Coming Out to ‘Poppy’: Heart, Soul, Reality

Poppy, I’m gay.”

The congressman and his former aide were tooling through Newport Beach in a red Mustang convertible on one of those balmy February days that makes the rest of the world envious of California when Brian O’Leary Bennett said the last thing that Bob Dornan ever expected to hear.

Dornan, the nation’s premier gay-basher, was about to have his belief system shattered by the simple truth that the gay enemy was an intimate associate who called him Poppy like his own kids did. The congressman who had made a career by deriding homosexuality as the perverse choice of those marked by a decadent culture was suddenly to discover that he himself had been the role model for a gay man.

“I had made up my mind to tell him. I had a lump in my throat, tears welled up in my eyes, I was nervous about his reaction,” Bennett recalled in a telephone interview on Sunday, just after he and his partner, Rick, had called their mothers to wish them a happy Mother’s Day. Bennett, now 41, had started working for Dornan when he was 21, moving into the congressman’s home. Over the next 12 years, he became Dornan’s chief of staff and designated heir apparent.

Bennett credits Dornan with having shown a measure of humanity in leaning over, putting his arm around him, kissing him on the cheek and saying, “I’ve loved you like a son for 20 years. Did you think this would make any difference?” But that was 15 months ago and in a private moment. Last week, when Bennett came out publicly in an interview with Jean Pasco of The Times, it made a big difference, and the old Dornan was back in form, thundering: “This is all Brian’s self-indulgence, no one would know who he was if not for Bob Dornan. He was dating women the whole time he worked for me. When he left, he was dating a general’s daughter.”

What Dornan cannot accept is that homosexuality is neither an indulgence nor the product of perverse and subversive cultural influences led by that army of “lesbian spear-chuckers” whom he once derided. As the example of Brian Bennett illustrates, being homosexual is as American as apple pie.

“I was the best little boy, straight A student in Catholic school, put myself through college, law school, no drugs, no alcohol,” Bennett recalls, “And then boom, up pops this question in my head that I might be gay--holy smoke, how could this happen to me?”

Bennett fought the good fight to be straight, including, as Dornan noted, dating the general’s daughter, whom he almost married. “How much stronger a role model could you want than Bob Dornan if you want to fight your own homosexuality,” Bennett mused, “and when those feelings wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I fought them in prayers, I eventually came to realize that he was wrong and I was right and that there is nothing to be ashamed of; this is how God made me.”

Bennett hopes that Dornan will end his vicious stereotyping of gays now that he has met one he once so admired. I doubt that because, unfortunately, hate has a purpose and life of its own. After all, Dornan made a practice of tormenting Rep. Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin, a fellow conservative Republican, “our homo,” who was most discreetly gay and like Bennett a man of serious religious commitment. In his last election campaign, Dornan derided his opponent, Loretta Sanchez, as a “Catholic for abortion and sodomy rights,” because she accepted the support of gay Democratic congressmen.

Offended by Dornan’s particularly nasty verbal assault on Gunderson on the floor of Congress last May, Bennett called up Dornan: “I asked him where he got this idea that we are all predators on the prowl for children. I told him, ‘Your grandchildren call me uncle--do you think I would do something to them?” and he said, ‘No, of course not.’ But he still says things like that despite the fact that in an absolute and per-capita basis more child molestation occurs in the heterosexual community. But facts don’t mean anything to him.”

I respect Bennett’s courage in coming out and his loyalty to an old friend and mentor. “If you didn’t know him, you’d think Dornan’s head and heart are filled with hate toward homosexuals. But I hope that having known me he will no longer view gays and lesbians as the enemy within to be persecuted.” Let’s hope so, but the pink triangle is only one reminder that hate is a killer not easily contained. Poppy, I’m gay. Adolf, I’m Jewish.