Coming Out Conservative

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this uneven autobiography, leading conservative activist Liebman chronicles the closeted homosexual life that he lived while pursuing his very public career. In 1990, after 40 years at the forefront of anti-communist politics and involvement in theater production, Liebman announced that he is homosexual in the National Review and the gay newsmagazine the Advocate . Though aware of his sexual orientation at an early age, he avoided publicly declaring it; after a demoralizing dishonorable discharge from the Army and a brief (annulled) marriage, he continued to hide his homosexuality from even his closest friends. Consequently, his book is more about his politics--and such associates as William F. Buckley, Clare Booth Luce and Ronald Reagan--than about his coming out. Asserting his belief in ``the importance of the individual over any state, political party or religious hierarchy,'' Liebman tells of founding, in the mid-1950s, the Committee of One Million, whose mission was to exclude Communist China from the United Nations, and, later, the Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union. Photos not seen by PW . (Sept.)

Library Journal

Liebman, a noted political strategist and fund-raiser for the Republican Party, is recognized as the founder of the modern conservative movement in the United States. Here, he offers fascinating insights into contemporary conservative politics. This autobiography resulted from his 1990 decision to distance the conservative political movement from the ``radical right.'' His first step was to write a ``coming out'' letter to both the conservative journal National Review and the gay news magazine The Advocate . Liebman's story provides a riveting account of what it is like to be gay and conservative, an often unacceptable combination within the gay rights movement in the United States. Not since Robert Bauman's The Gentlemen from Maryland ( LJ 8/86) has the issue of gay conservatives been examined in such a forthright manner. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-- Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Lib., Ind.

Charles Harmon

Stalwart conservative Liebman tells of 40-odd years hobnobbing with right-wing bigwigs like Reagan, Goldwater, and Buckley. Stories of meetings with President Eisenhower, travels with official U.S. delegations overseas, founding the interest group that kept China out of the UN for 20 years, and other activities are fascinating first-hand accounts of twentieth-century history in the making. Yet the book is neither staid nor irrelevant to today's politics. Particularly intriguing in Liebman's personal life is the effect that growing up with huge glasses in a middle-class New York Jewish family and serving in the Army Air Corps with an oversized helmet and a gas mask that would never stay attached had on his gray years. For in both boyhood and the army he encountered discrimination and stereotyping that were major influences upon his coming out of the closet as gay when he was 67. He warns that gays and lesbians may be the scapegoats of the forthcoming decade, just as blacks, Jews, and other non-WASPs have been in the past, but still, his autobiography's primary value may be as social history of American conservatism.