Badpuppy Gay Today

Friday, 4 April 1997

Marvin Liebman, a pioneering leader in conservative politics who later renounced his prominent place in the Republican party and who publicly turned his back on the conservative movement he helped found, died of heart failure March 31 at George Washington University Hospital in the nation's capital. He was 73.

Liebman, bravely giving up his historic claim to past conservative glories and rightfully taking his place as a self-accepting gay man, is considered a hero by many gay men and lesbians for having done so. "I can no longer call myself a conservative, a Christian or a Republican," he stated in a column written in 1995 for The Advocate, the nation's oldest surviving gay newsmagazine. "I am a gay American, and I will retain my independence from any other label," he wrote.

Liebman, who was both a fund raiser and a strategist for the American conservative movement, was also a founder of such organizations as Young Americans For Freedom and the American Conservative Union. In 1990, he shed a lifetime of closeted living after writing a coming-out letter to his long-time friend and mentor, William F. Buckley, Jr., editor-in-chief of the National Review, "I am almost 67 years old." he told Buckley, "For more than half my lifetime I have been engaged in, and indeed helped to organize and maintain, the conservative and anti-communist cause...the Conservative Party of New York...the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns...All the time I labored in the conservative vineyard I was gay."

Appalled by what he perceived as unacceptable eruptions of homophobia in the Republican and conservative causes, he discovered he could no longer self-identify as a fund raiser for or supporter of those causes. Born into the Jewish faith, Liebman had, under William F. Buckley's guidance, converted to Roman Catholicism. Upon that occasion Buckley had served as his godfather. But within only a few years time, he said in his 1992 autobiography, "Coming Out Conservative", he'd begun to "feel like a Jew in Germany in 1934 who had chosen to remain silent, hoping to be able to stay invisible as he watched the beginning of the Holocaust." Liebman later renounced his ties to Catholicism.

In one private conversation with Ronald Reagan, Liebman wrote how the former president had worried aloud to him over Ron Reagan, Jr.'s decision to become a dancer. "Aren't dancers...aren't dancers sort of funny?" Reagan asked the conservative pioneer.

"Not necessarily," replied Liebman, regretting, as he tells in "Coming Out Conservative," that "Once again, for the thousandth time, I had stood quietly and achingly a gay man in the closet, competent to deal with Ronald Reagan's fears about his son, unable to deal openly with the facts of my own life."

Rex Wockner, internationally syndicated correspondent and a contributor to GayToday, shared e-mail from author and columnist Michelangelo Signorile, telling of Liebman's last hours: "I received a telephone call from some of Marvin's friends, who'd gathered at his home last night (Monday). He did indeed pass away, after having gone to the hospital Sunday with a heart problem. Doctors inserted a valve in his heart and thought he was fine, but there were soon other complications, such as blood in his lungs, etc. And he died on Monday, according to those friends. As per his will, these friends say, he does not want a funeral or a memorial service, as his body will be cremated."

Marvin Liebman wrote regularly, starting in the early 1990's, for the gay and lesbian press.