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Ashburn Confirms He is Gay – Dan Savage Weighs In

Posted by: Natasia Rose on March 8, 2010.

: Image by Aquafilia via Flickr

03/08/2010- by Natasia Langfelder

In news that we all knew already, anti-gay Senator Roy Ashburn confirmed that he is gay. The Republican Senator has been on leave from the Senate since his arrest for DUI last week. The Senator was drunk, driving home from a gay bar, with another man with him in the car. This morning, he announced his sexual orientation on a radio show.

“I’m gay,” Ashburn told KERN radio host Inga Barks in an interview this morning. “Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long.”

The Bakersfield Republican, tried to rationalize his record of consistently voting against gay-rights measures,said his votes were a reflection of how the majority of voters in his conservative district would have wanted him to vote. Perhaps he should have just told the truth, and said that he is a victim of internalized homophobia and his voting record was his way of attempting to hide his sexuality from the world and attempt to make others as ashamed of their sexuality as he is. Hopefully, this journey will lead Ashburn to accept himself and makes amends to his community. Not to mention his consituents, any of whom he could have killed while driving drunk.

Ashburn, who is divorced, has been on personal leave in the Senate since last week’s arrest. He is expected to return today.

Dan Savage, author, advice columnist and LGBT activist had this to say about Ashburn and the other middle aged, homophobic gay men who fight against the community they long to be a part of:

What I wrote about Spokane mayor Jim West in January of 2006 applies doubly to Ashburn:

But none of the sympathy I felt for middle-aged gay men I met in the early 1980s extended to West—or to any closeted middle-aged men today who fear getting caught.West is 54 years old. That means he was 18 in 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots. He was 26 in 1977, the year that Harvey Milk was elected to the board of supervisors in San Francisco. He was 29 years old when I was 17 and hanging out in bars in Chicago. He was 34 years old when my boyfriend was being beaten in his Spokane high school, in a district that West represented in the Washington State legislature

Jim West knew better. He knew he didn’t have to live a lie. He knew he could have lived as an openly gay or bisexual man—bisexual is all West has admitted to in most of his interviews, although no pictures of young women were found on his work computer—but he chose not to. Unlike the older gay men I met in 1981, West and other closeted middle-aged men today didn’t come of age at a time when no one could conceive of openly gay and lesbian people and communities. (Or politicians: Washington State has four openly gay members of its legislature.) Jim West chose the closet and shame and lies and hypocrisy.

So while I had sympathy for gay men who came out late in life in the 1970s and 1980s, I find I have no sympathy for Jim West or other men like him today. Their stories aren’t tragic, they’re pathetic. They didn’t miss out. They opted out. Fuck ‘em.

Ashburn was 15-years-old in 1969. Fuck him.

UPDATE: Joe points out that Ashburn—new that he’s out of the closet—still plans to vote against gay rights legislation. So, like, fuck Roy Ashburn. Fuck with something that’s been dipped in napalm and dredged through ground glass. Seriously.