Gay activist Mike Rogers delivered his
Roy Cohn award to Senator John McCain's Chief of Staff Mark Buse at
his Washington D.C. office on Monday. The award recognizes
high-profile gays and lesbians who work against the interests of the
gay and lesbian community.
In making his case against Buse, Rogers
said: “Mark Buse is not just a chief of staff for a homophobic
United States senator, but he is helping that senator get elected to
the White House.”
Rogers wrote on his blog Monday that
three sources have confirmed to him that Buse is gay and in a
long-term relationship with another man. And an ex-boyfriend of some
twenty years has also stepped forward, speaking to satellite radio
host Michelangelo Signorile.
Brian Davis, a forty-six year-old
Arizona truck driver, said he lived with Buse for about a year in the
late 80s. “We met in June of 1986. It was a bar in Phoenix called
Connections,” Davis told Signorile.
Davis, an openly gay man, who claims he
has voted for McCain as Arizona Senator and in the Republican
presidential primary, says he came forward after McCain picked a
clearly anti-gay running mate, Governor Sarah Palin. After that, he
says, he no longer believed McCain's long-standing rhetoric of being
a centrist Republican.
The ex-lover also said he believed
McCain was aware that Buse was gay.
A commenter going by the username
JamesR wrote on Rogers' blog about the Buse outing, “[When it was
reveled that Buse was gay] McCain was supportive and decent ...
Everyone on the Hill and beyond knows Mark is gay. What is
surprising is how long it took for someone to complain to eager
bloggers about it.”
Rogers is best know for calling Senator
Larry Craig (R-Idaho) a hypocritical gay man when he accused him of
sexual encounters with men in a Washington D.C. public restroom long
before his infamous 2007 arrest in a Minneapolis airport restroom sex
sting operation.
The Roy Cohn award is named after a
central figure of the 1950s McCarthy hearings. Senator Joseph
McCarthy started a wave of panic when he claimed the State Department
had been infiltrated by communists. Cohn helped McCarthy prosecute
the alleged communists, which fueled the hysteria and blacklisting
that followed. McCarthy and his team also targeted gays and
lesbians. Cohn denied rumors of being gay even after he was
diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, claiming he was dying of liver cancer.
Buse's years on K Street lobbying
Congress for special interest groups is another contentious point for
the McCain campaign. After serving McCain for seven years, Buse left
in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies, reports the New
York Times.
For a campaign that bills itself as
free from special interests and is attempting to jockey an anti-gay
right-wing conservative power play, Mark Buse is fodder for
progressives who endeavor to call out the McCain campaign as hollow,
hypocritical and insincere.
The McCain campaign has not commented
on this issue.
On the net: Mike Rogers' BlogActive
blog is at www.blogactive.com