Closeted-gay Republicans could be VERY much in the news any day now!

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Après Larry Craig, le déluge?

Who's next?



It may not come as a shock to many people that Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) is gay. This has been common knowledge in his California district and in the California Republican Party for a very long time. However, it might be news in some other parts of the country. The same activist blogger who outed Larry Craig back in October 2006, outed David Dreier three years ago, detailing his relationship with his chief of staff. Outing David Dreier shouldn't really count as anything new.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is widely assumed to be gay by his Republican colleagues but unlike David Dreier and Mark Foley, Graham has worked at keeping his private life private. However, he is a Republican and he is up for reelection in 2008. In the eyes of some bloggers, that makes him fair game. Chances are good he will be outed soon.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), currently married to Elaine Chou, is not as widely known as gay among his colleagues but there are certainly enough reports online from people who knew him back in his Army days that McConnell should be concerned. His office has refused to release his Army discharge papers. The blogger who outed Larry Craig filed a Freedom of Information Act Request to get them. McConnell was kicked out of the Army after only a few weeks in 1967, reportedly for fondling a private's privates, according to online reports.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has been extremely careless in keeping his private life private. He has set himself up for exposure by activist bloggers because of his extreme anti-gay comments and positions. It didn't help any when his aide and one-time 'housemate,' Michael Aaron Lay, was arrested for voter fraud. McHenry won his Republican primary by only 86 votes and some of this Republican rivals in North Carolina are out to get him.

Remember when we talked about the triple murder-suicide in Orlando, Florida last month? The one where gay former Marine Jason Robert Drake shot closeted-gay Republican consultant and former executive director of the Georgia GOP Ralph Gonzales and his straight roommate David Abrami before turning the gun on himself? At first the news media reported it as a "lovers' quarrel" based on something one of the police detectives told them but they removed that reference just five or six hours later after more information came to light.

One thing that is different today in criminal investigations is that the internet is an amazing source of information and leads. Many different people in different parts of the country may know a little bit of the puzzle and when they all start posting what they know anonymously to various blogs, the big picture begins to emerge. It now appears that there is a tie-in between the triple murder-suicide in Florida and the murder of the owner of a gay escort service in Washington, D.C. The tie-in is Jason David Drake. It looks like he was an intimate acquaintance of Ralph Gonzales and Patrick McHenry and an intimate acquaintance of Harlow Cuadra, the owner of a different gay excort service who is charged with murder of the owner of another competing gay escort service. In fact, it has been speculated that Drake was trying to get money from Gonzales to use to aid the defense of Cuadra who is in custody right now charged with murdering that other gay escort service owner.

To make matters more complicated, certain Florida GOP elected officials are involved and it's quite possible that Ralph Reed could end up outed by this whole mess. That would be nice! Ralph Reed and Ralph Gonzales were allegedly intimate in the past when Ralph Gonzales was the executive director of the Georgia Republican Party. It's also quite possible that there exists a list of Republican elected officials who were patrons of these two Washington, D.C. area gay escort services.

So, tell us again, where does Patrick McHenry come in? It is being claimed online that Patrick McHenry was one of several prominent closeted-gay Republicans in the Washington, D.C. area who were paying clients of these two gay escort services and that Patrick McHenry was intimately acquainted with both Ralph Gonzales and Jason Drake, in addition to being a regular client of at least one of the services. This could lead to Patrick McHenry being called as a witness in the pending trial in Washington of the guy accused of murdering the gay escort service owner. No doubt McHenry would be questioned about his relationships with the various parties.

If you enter any of the following names on Google's Blog search, you get lots and lots of hits: Ralph Gonzales, Jason Drake, Bryan Kocis (murdered gay escort service owner), Harlow Cuadra (rival gay escort service owner charged with murdering Kocis), Joseph Kerekes (escort service co-owner with Cuadra, also charged with murder of Kocis), Sean Lockhart, Grant Roy, and Patrick McHenry.

It's one thing to out a closeted-gay U.S. senator, like Larry Craig, for attempting to hook up with a male cop in a men's restroom but that's nothing compared to what will hit the fan if closeted-gay Republican congressmen are called to testify in a murder trial as customers of a gay escort service. The reason it's a problem for them is because their party has chosen to make opposition to same-sex sexual orientation a major part of their platform. Besides, many of these closeted-gay Republican elected officials are married. So that would involve the sanctity of marriage stuff, too. David Dreier, Patrick McHenry and Lindsey Graham are not married and have never been married but some of the other people involved are married.

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Even the right-wing conservative blogs are starting to pick up on this story: North Carolina Conservative

Caution: The escort websites they referenced are XXX-rated.

P.S. -- NC Conservative has a few errors. They're relying an AP story that is filled with errors. For starters, Jason Robert Drake is the correct name, not Robert Drake or Robert Jason Drake, and he's not "from Rutherford, NC." He has family in that area but he wasn't born there and he's not "from there." This corrected information was emailed to another blog by his ex-wife who has been following this story very closely on all the blogs. Also, they misspelled Rep. Tom Feeney's name (they left out the third "e").

P.P.S. -- I think the confusion with Jason Robert Drake's name may be due to the fact that it appears that he used the name Robert Drake when he was working as a GOP operative. His correct name appears to be Jason Robert Drake.

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Recap: AmericaBlog.com has a post that tries to tie together the various links between the murder investigations in two different states and the various GOP operatives and elected officials, especially Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC).

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Update on Patrick McHenry (R-NC)

This Patrick McHenry story is moving very slowly. It's more of an embarrassment for McHenry than anything else, at least at the moment. It has been revealed that four Young Republican dudes were registered to vote at his residence, at least one of whom seems to have commuted back and forth while in college in order to be able to spend a few nights a week at McHenry's residence. He has had campaign aides plead guilty to voter fraud and cut deals to avoid jail time and he has had it revealed that he was personally acquainted with a guy, now dead, who worked as a GOP operative while moonlighting as a gay escort, adult video performer. That guy murdered two other GOP operatives before turning the gun on himself.

Interestingly enough, this same guy is tied to another murder in the Washington, D.C. area involving the death of the gay owner of a gay escort service reportedly patronized by closeted GOP politicians, including McHenry. This guy, the gay former Marine, didn't participate in the murder of the escort service owner but he was a very close friend of one of the guys accused of that murder and he worked for that escort service off and on.

Some people think that the reason he shot the two guys in Florida was because he was upset that one of them wouldn't lend him money to aid in the defense of his pal who was accused of murder. He and the gay GOP operative he shot had been close in the past. What makes this situation complicated for the GOP is that these two separate murder investigations are uncovering a lot of other things that they would prefer remain in the closet. The murdered gay GOP operative in Florida knew a lot of people and the now dead gay former Marine who killed him knew a lot of people, mostly Republicans and mostly involved in politics in one way or another.

Little things keep popping up, such as the fact that back in 2001, Patrick McHenry voted in North Carolina while at the same time taking a D.C. tax deduction for a house he co-owned there with his friend Scott G. Stewart. Stewart was Chairman of the College Republican National Committee from 1999-2003. McHenry was treasurer of the CRNC from 1997-1999. Paul Gourley was Chairman of the CRNC in 2006 and Glenn Murphy headed the YRs for a few weeks in 2007. Two other famous CRNC chairmen are Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman.

In order to qualify for the D.C. property tax deduction, you have to fill out a form certifying that the property in question is your principal domicile. There is even a question about where you are registered to vote. If you say that you are registered to vote in another area, you won't get the tax deduction. Patrick McHenry took the $60,000 deduction off the property's assessed value for the second half of 2001 while at the same time voting in North Carolina. I doubt that anyone will make a federal case out of this. If anything, the District could go after him for underpayment of property taxes in 2001 but I doubt it.

The other problem McHenry has is that he has made a lot of enemies among local Republican politicians in North Carolina and they are talking about who helped him and how he managed to get elected to Congress at such a young age. McHenry's GOP connections go all the way back to when he was still in high school. That's when he first came to the attention of certain people at the Republican National Committee. McHenry has been an eager volunteer for the RNC since his teens.