| “When I saw that
it was a person from Washington I was very excited,”
Koering recalls. “I immediately thought: national
news on this bill.”
“I started to explain to him about the bill,
what the intent was,” he continues. “He
proceeded to tell me, under your bill, if I said I had
some pictures of you at Bang, a gay bar… would
that be illegal?”
Koering says he was speechless.
“Somebody was sitting here in my office, and
I was trying not to say something stupid,” he
notes. “Finally I had to ask this person to step
out.”
Koering and Rogers continued their banter until at
one point Rogers asked, “Are you gay?”
The senator said he didn’t think it was any of
Rogers’ business. Rogers said he was recording
the call.
“I thought about hanging up,” the Minnesotan
says. “And so I put him on hold because I didn’t
know what to do, and so I went over to our chief of
staff’s office a couple of doors down from me,
and he was not there. It gave me a minute and a half
to cool off, so I got back on my phone, and I said,
‘Mike, yeah, I’m gay, ask me whatever you
want to ask me. If that’s what you want to do,
it’s fine with me.’”
After admitting he was gay, the senator says he and
Rogers had an amicable conversation.
“We actually had at that point I think a very
civil conversation,” Koering recalls. “I
actually could see that once I opened up my heart like
I normally do I could see that I felt that he thought”
similar things.
Koering told Rogers of an internal party discussion
around the time was freshly elected. He said that he
had stood up to another member of the Republican caucus
who wanted to try to abolish the 1993 revision
of the state’s Human Rights Act that included
protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation.
“He said to me, I don’t really know if
there’s a story here,” the senator says.
“That’s kind of where we left it.”
“He did what far too few people do in our country,”
Rogers says. “He took the hard road and did the
hard decision to do what he think was right.”
Rogers reflected
on the call on blogACTIVE on Apr. 4 without mentioning
Koering by name or even the state in which he was elected
to serve.
“As the legislator and I talked it became more
and more clear the [sic] me that this individual was
one of the many examples of a gay member of the GOP
who should not be reported on,” the Washington
blogger wrote. “Like every other story, I review
the totality of the matter and decide with my advisors
if the story is worth reporting. In this case, like
so many others, the file is closed and no story is written.”
“Why?” he added. “Because blogACTIVE.com
does not report on every closeted politician from one
party or the other.”
Koering says he read Rogers’ post and was “pleasantly
surprised.”
“I’ve got to say that I was pleasantly
surprised by that, and I think it—honestly it
made me think some more about who I am as a person and
how much does this job mean to me,” he told RAW
STORY. “Does it mean that much to me that
I’m going to deny who I am?”
Several days later, on Apr. 7, Minnesota Republican state
Sen. Michele Bachman moved to bring a measure allowing
a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to go
to the Senate floor. The move was made despite the fact
that measure had not been approved by the appropriate
committees. Outside the Capitol, gay and lesbian activists
were marching outside the capitol for equal rights.
Koering voted no—the lone Republican to do so—and
along with opposition from 34 Democrats, the measure
failed. The senator said he cried all the way home.
“I left the Capitol and I immediately started
for home—it’s a two and half hour drive,”
he recalls. “I literally cried all the way.”
That night, the senator called Rogers.
“I said hey, I voted against the marriage amendment
and we talked about that and we talked several more
times over the weekend,” Koering says. “I’ve
got a lot of gay friends but they’re not really
interested in politics like I am so it was kind of refreshing
to talk to Mike.”
“So I got back to the Capitol on Monday,”
he continues, “and the Associated Press reporter
kind of said, if you ever want to talk about your orientation…
and then the word was here that we were going to be
taking another vote on the marriage amendment this week.”
“At that point I just thought, I’ve gone
as far as I can go, I’ve just got to tell my constituents,
you know what, I’m gay, let’s just put it
out there and be done with it, and hopefully I can put
it behind me and get on to work that I want to get done
here.”
Koering isn’t as cheerful about those who were
circulating pictures of him taken at a Minneapolis gay
bar. In the Minneapolis Star Tribune Thursday,
he said of pressure from those who had pressed the photographs
on reporters, “They can do, and I’m sure
they will continue to do, whatever they want, which
I think is a sad state of affairs.”
Of Rogers, the Minnesotan is kinder.
“I guess people can be critical of Mike, and
say that he’s doing something that shouldn’t
be done, but in my case, he didn’t out me,”
he says. “Did I like the way he confronted me?
Not necessarily, but was it true. So why would a politician
be running from the truth?”
He cautions Rogers, however, not to lob questions unnecessarily.
“I still think that Mike has a job to not just
go out and willy-nilly ruin people’s lives or
careers,” he asserts. “I think he has to
realize as blogs become more and more important or are
more relevant to the political process that he’s
got to be careful that he doesn’t just go and
ruin somebody who is a good person. He’s got to
be judicious on how he goes about this and do his homework
very well and have his ducks in a row before he confronts
somebody.”
Yet Koering, unlike many in his party—and those
at gay and lesbian rights lobby groups in Washington—told
RAW STORY he supports
Rogers’ efforts to report on gay politicians who
use their positions of power to thwart gay rights.
“I do believe it is appropriate when you have
a politician who is a hypocrite,” the senator
says. “Somebody who is possibly in the closet
and uses their bully pulpit or their position to bash
gay people or to make gay people’s lives difficult
in their position and are in essence leading a double
life—people like that need to be exposed for the
hypocrite that they are.
“Those people need to be exposed for who they
are because they are a very poor excuse for a public
official, as far as I’m concerned,” he adds.
“We don’t need hypocrites in government.
Government is too screwed up as it is.”
Koering declines to criticize Republican National Committee
chairman Ken Mehlman and Rep. David Dreier (R-CA), two
prominent members of his party who have been outed and
are accused of working against gay rights.
“I don’t know those people and I haven’t
followed those people, so I can’t speak with intelligence
on what they do,” he says, “but it’s
just my opinion that if politicians engage in what I
call hypocritical behavior… and then are going
out and engaging in the same behavior that they’re
railing against, those people need to be exposed for
who they are. That’s just not right.
“I sometimes find that the people that you find
who are hollering the loudest, and who are putting people
down the most, are the ones that have the most to hide,”
he continues. “And they’re so uncomfortable
in their own skin that they have to tear everybody else
down to make themselves feel good.”
But as for “people who are gay and are just in
office to do the work of their constituents and they’re
not bashing gay people,” he says, “I don’t
think anybody has the right to out people like that.”
Asked whether Rogers’ initial call prompted him
to come out, Koering says no. He notes that the day
of the amendment vote was the second anniversary of
his mother’s death, and that it was “gay
and lesbian day” at the Capitol, with activists
lobbying outside.
“I don’t think Mike’s call made me
make the decision to come out,” he states. “It
was starting with Mike, it was the vote that I took
on the marriage amendment, being that it all coincided—it
was just almost like—it was almost like it was
all meant to be.”
Did he feel torn after voting against the rest of his
party?
“I actually feel relieved that I voted the way
I did,” he says. “I feel like I made the
right vote, and I wouldn’t change it, and I feel
like I did do the right thing. And if in doing the right
thing I get unelected, I guess that’s fine with
me; I can live with that.”
Both Rogers and Koering praise each other, saying that
though they are a world apart on some issues, they find
common ground on issues surrounding gay civil rights.
Koering, a stalwart conservative, sponsored bills attempting
to make English Minnesota’s official language
and attempted to name a state building after President
Ronald Reagan, according to the Star Tribune. He’s
also a deer hunter.
Rogers, meanwhile, has been active in groups such as
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and ACT
UP, a gay rights group many see as radical.
But this doesn’t seem to deter the two from seeing
eye-to-eye.
“Even though Mike and I politically don’t
agree,” Koering says, “being that we’re
both gay I feel kind of—I don’t know if
kinship is the right word—that we have something
in common. We’re both gay and we can’t change
that, and all we want to do is live our lives. And in
talking with Mike, I feel like I’m a good judge
of character, I think that the guy is a compassionate
person.”
“Paul Koering is my brother and on behalf of
the millions of out lesbian sisters and gay brothers,
I welcome Paul into our family,” Rogers says.
“Are there disagreements? Are there family discussions
we need to have? Without a doubt. And those discussions
on the issues that are important to America will come.”
“But for the moment,” he continues, “the
only appropriate focus on this story is the heroic steps
taken by Senator Paul Koering in his journey to bring
the truth about gay and lesbian Americans to the most
important people in Paul’s job: the constituents
of his district. He has served them well. He should
be proud.”
Rogers saves his vitriol for the leadership of the
Republican gay rights lobby Log Cabin Republicans. Koering
told RAW STORY that
he has had good conversations with members of the group.
But he added that when the group’s president—a
former state legislator himself—called him and
then allegedly would not return his calls, he got frustrated.
“If I was the executive director of the Log Cabin
Republicans and you’re trying to promote gay Republicans
and some legislator calls and says 'I’m gay,'
I guess I would have kept calling every three minutes
order to talk to that person,” he said.
Chris Barron, political director for the Log Cabin
group, cheers Koering’s decision to come out,
though he disputes his version of events.
In a statement to the blog BoiFromTroy
(and verified with Barron), the Log Cabin Republican
praises the senator “for his courageous decision
to come out and for his courageous opposition to the
marriage amendment.”
“When I spoke to the senator earlier this year
I made it clear that we at Log Cabin appreciated his
voice and his courage as an elected gay official,”
he says. “After that conversation, we traded emails
and he made it clear in those emails, and conversation,
that he appreciated me taking the time to talk to him.”
“I also put him in touch with our president,
Patrick Guerriero,” he continues. “Patrick
spoke to the senator, after a series of back and forth
voicemails, and actually offered to go meet with him
in Minnesota this year. We wish him well, are willing
to work with him in building an inclusive GOP, and again
thank him for his courage.”
Rogers says the senator’s story is an endorsement
of his work. He believes that if the Log Cabin Republicans
had been more engaged (the group opposes outing), they
would have likely told Koering to keep away from him.
On blogACTIVE, Rogers has called on the group’s
director to resign.
“Paul Koering is the first to publicly state
without my prompting the unquestionable contributions
my work has made to our community, and this endorsement
by the senator is in the shadow of the abject failure
of the Log Cabin Republicans to appropriately address
the most basic tenets of their mission,” he quips.
Barron strongly disagrees, and says he believes Rogers
unfairly targets those he doesn’t like.
“We oppose outing period,” Barron told
RAW STORY Wednesday.
“So far this outing campaign has not changed one
vote. Every moment spent calling an office to find out
whether or not someone is gay is a call not spent encouraging
a legislator to support pro-gay legislation or encouraging
a legislator not to vote for anti-gay legislation…We
need to be calling people to support our families. We
don’t need to be calling to engage in some sort
of personal battle.”
Log Cabin Republicans are not the only gay rights lobby
to oppose outing. Human Rights Campaign, the largest
U.S. gay rights group, says publicly that they are against
outing, though their new president recently
declined to criticize outing campaigns. The National
Gay and Lesbian Task Force (where Rogers previously
worked as a fundraiser) does not publicly oppose outing
of politicians who work against gay rights.
For Barron, Rogers work is personal.
“I’ve gotten calls from friends of mine
who are lowly staffers in tears from the things Mike
Rogers has done,” he adds. “It’s clear
that he is not simply targeting folks who have authority,
who have the ability to actually set policy; he’s
targeting anybody he doesn’t like.”
Chris Crain, editor of the Washington D.C. gay newspaper,
The Blade, criticized Rogers in a RAW
STORY interview earlier this year. While Crain says
that he supports reporting on gay politicians who publicly
thwart gay rights, he calls Rogers’ phone calls
“badgering” and “harassment.”
“I don’t think Mike is the media,”
he said. “I think he’s an activist, and
using the cover of journalism to do what he does—and
that’s his right, he can do what he wants—but
I think it sullies the name of journalism when he does
it.”
Rogers dismisses such criticism, calling it “slanderous.”
He says he knows his style is aggressive, but he sees
his involvement in Koering’s coming out as a vindication
of his work and proof that his detractors are derelict
in their responsibilities to advance gay rights.
“Senator Paul Koering’s voluntary coming
out story is an indictment of every senior staff member
of the Log Cabin’s national office and the leadership
of the Minnesota Log Cabin Republican chapter,”
he says.
“Paul Koering credited the thousands of activists
outside the Minnesota state house in motivating him
and his personal reflections prior to casting his vote,”
he adds. “If there is one lesson that every lesbian
and gay American can take from this entire story, is
that the next time you’re sitting at home and
wondering, should I go on that lobby day, should I call
my legislator, should I get involved in my community,
let the story of the courage of Sen. Paul Koering speak
for itself. These rallies and the participation of gay
and lesbian Americans is not an option, it’s an
absolute must if our community is to move forward.”
Koering is more reserved.
“I don’t think that society is ready for
saying that two men can be together as a marriage,”
he says. “I don’t think that society is
ready for that.”
Asked how he would vote if Minnesota’s Defense
of Marriage Act (which prohibits the state from recognizing
gay marriages) came up for a vote today, he said he
couldn’t be sure.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I
think that I would have to hear from both sides and
I would have to hear why …I certainly would want
to hear the debate on this and talk about it and see
if society is ready for this.”
“I think some of the gay activists will be upset
with me for this, but sometimes I think an agenda is
pushed so far and so fast that people have no alternative
but to push back,” he adds. “And I think
that sometimes you have to move slowly.”
But Koering says Rogers’ call—which at
first put him on his guard—was a blessing in disguise.
“I think in Mike calling me what turned out to
be chunk of coal kind of turned into a diamond,”
he quips. “Because I think it started out very
awkward and I was on the defense, but it really turned
out to be something good.”
Editor’s note: Given that RAW STORY has a
franchise agreement with Mike Rogers for RawStoryQ,
I considered dropping this story altogether to obviate
any appearance of conflict of interest. Ultimately,
I decided the right and desire of readers to read the
full story outweighed my personal reservations.
Article originally published Apr. 14, 2005. |
