The Pink Mafia - Part 1

The Hidden Power Structure of Closeted Gay Men in the Republican Party

By Stuart Stevens

When I see the explosion of sexual orientation hate coming out of the Republican Party under the false pretense of it being limited to anti-trans hate, I can’t help but think of the powerful role closeted gay men have played in the modern Republican Party. Below is the first of a series of pieces I’m writing reflecting on my experiences with what was widely known as the GOP’s Pink Mafia.

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My first entry into politics was through the hidden world of gay Republicans. I didn’t know it, but looking back, odds are I never would have become a political consultant if it were not for what I later learned was known as the “Pink Mafia.”

It started when I was 16 and a Congressional page for a Mississippi Congressman named Charlie Griffin. My boss was the guy who ran his office. At that time, the top aides in Congressional offices were called “Administrative Assistants” or “AAs.” Later, probably because having AA on your resume didn’t help your earning power as a lobbyist once you left for K. Street, that title was elevated to the august Chief of Staff. His name was Jon Hinson.

Jon was a country boy from Tylertown, Mississippi, who had also been a page and spent most of his adult life working on Capitol Hill. He was smart, funny, and profoundly respected Congress and the institutions of the American government. My first week, he gave me a tour of the Capitol that could not have been more reverential if he had been a Cardinal describing the Vatican.

Coming from Walthall County, Mississippi, in rural South Mississippi in an area known as the “piney woods,” Jon embraced life in Washington, DC, with the delight of Holly Golightly coming to Manhattan. The DC he knew wasn’t “a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm” as JFK once described Washington. It was a cosmopolitan city on a hill, with ethnic restaurants, theater, music. It was the JFK Center of Performing Arts, Arena Stage, Clyde’s Bar and Restaurant in Georgetown, the Hawk and Dove on Capitol Hill, and the Sans Souci for special occasions. It was a place with enough gay bars and restaurants that 8^th Street Southeast was known, among those in the know, as the Gay Way. Barracks Row was the home of the Marine Barracks and a hub of gay life. Sixteen and straight, I knew nothing of this other world. But for a man who was bisexual like Jon Hinson, it was an open door from small-town Mississippi to a rich life lived in color.

On a couple of weekends, Jon Hinson invited me to accompany him to a beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware. He and a few friends, all male, shared the rental as a DC retreat. The guys were a lot like Jon: in their thirties, working on Capitol Hill, full of inside gossip about Members of Congress and Senators. Now I realize they were likely all gay, but no one ever hit on me or said anything that made me uncomfortable. I had met and was “dating” another page, which mostly meant we were regulars on the Capitol Hill receptions with free food, who later helped pay for her PhD through beauty pageants, and they kidded me some about her attractiveness. But it all felt harmless, like older brothers.

Years later, when I was in graduate film school at UCLA, Jon Hinson called and told me he was running for Congress. He was now AA to Mississippi Congressman Thad Cochran, who had decided to run for the US Senate following the retirement of Senator John Eastland. Jon was running for the Republican nomination in the race to replace Cochran. The Democratic nominee was John Hampton Stennis, son of Mississippi’s all-powerful Senator John Stennis. It was assumed that John Hampton, as he was known, would easily win. Hinson explained that he had no money, no campaign organization, and no one to make television commercials. “You have to make my ads,” he said, “I can’t afford to hire anyone.” I explained that I had no idea how to make commercials, that I only made these stupid little films, but Jon was insistent.

So, I became a political media consultant.

I spent a lot of time in those pre-election months riding around with Hinson in the then Fourth Congressional District that stretched from Vicksburg on the Mississippi River across to my hometown of Jackson and dipped down to include some of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Then Mississippi had five Congressional districts, now reduced to four. It was the chitlin circuit of local politics: fish fries, Kiwanis, Lions and Rotary clubs, Friday night high school football games. Jon’s dad was a Democratic Supervisor in Walthall County and had deep connections with the powerful network of county supervisors. The guys – and they were all guys – you called when you wanted a pothole filled on your street or a dirt road to your deer camp graded with fresh gravel. (Later, as one more act in a Shakespearean-like tragedy, Jon’s parents would die in their home in a New Year’s Eve fire.)

We spent hours talking about everything and nothing. Not once did I get any hint that Hinson was interested in other men, but there was one moment that, looking back, should have flashed a red warning signal that he had a predilection for risky sex. One of the New Orleans television stations had a morning “exercise” show hosted by a twenty-something former Ole Miss cheerleader who led her audience through aerobics. Think early Jane Fonda workout days. I knew she and Hinson had dated some, but I wasn’t prepared to walk into a back room of our Jackson headquarters shortly before its official opening to find them having sex on a tattered couch.

I never mentioned it to him, and he never said anything. The official opening a half hour later was a big success.

Jon Hinson won that Congressional race primarily because he was in the right place at the right time. Thad Cochran swept to victory in the Senate race with the help of the third-party candidacy of Charles Evers, brother of slain Civil Rights hero Medgar Evers, who drained most of the Black vote from the Democratic nominee. As is usually the case when a popular Member of Congress runs state-wide, Cochran over-performed in his former Congressional district, pushing Hinson to victory over John Hampton Stennis.

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“There’s something I should have told you,” Congressman Jon Hinson said flatly. This was before cell phones, and he had somehow tracked me down by phone in a Midas Muffler shop in Vermont, where I was spending my summer working on an MA in English from Middlebury College. Later, as my career developed, I would learn these are among the worst seven words a client can utter. Whatever follows will be somewhere between the merely disastrous and the fatal. This was in the summer, a few months before Hinson would appear on the ballot for the first time as an incumbent Congressman running for re-election.

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Hinson proceeded to tell me that when he was working as Congressman Thad Cohran’s chief of staff, he had been arrested at the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, for indecent behavior. That was how he phrased it, “indecent behavior.” I’m embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what he was trying to say. This couldn’t have made it easier on him. “What do you mean?” I asked. There was a pause, and then, to his credit, he laughed. “You’re not joking just to make this harder, are you?” And then, for some reason, it connected. I digested it the way I was beginning to learn to do as a consultant, without any thought of the incident itself or any sympathy for the client but in a clinical analysis of the various options moving forward. Then he said what I have learned are the absolutely worst three words: “But there’s more.” And there was.

The newly elected congressman went on to describe how as a Congressional staffer, he had left his job In the Longworth Congressional office building one afternoon and walked over to a gay porno theater, Cinema Follies, in the then-seedy part of Southeast Washington. It was upstairs over a storefront. During the film, a worker was cleaning the carpet on the stairs while smoking and accidentally ignited the cleaning fluid, engulfing the stairs in flames. Only one of the ten men inside the theater survived—Jon Hinson.

He was calling to tell me this because he believed that his Democratic opponent had learned of both incidents, and it might come out in the press. I vividly remember the moment. Waiting for the muffler of my ancient Volvo to be repaired, I felt exhilarated, like a field goal kicker called on to win the game. I hope I expressed some sympathy for his near-death experience, but I’m sure that’s not what I was thinking about. This was an election problem, and it needed to be solved.

I had little experience in campaigns at the time, but I had a natural feel for the combat of campaigns. I knew instinctively that the only hope of survival was for Hinson to come forward and preempt any revelations by telling all to the press. Hinson was terrified of defeat and naturally felt very vulnerable on multiple fronts. So, he listened and followed my advice.

Since being elected, he married a long-time girlfriend, a former beauty queen from Georgia who worked on the Hill. (There seemed to be a lot of American beauty pageant graduates working in Washington.) With her standing by his side, he gave what quickly became a legendary press conference in which he told the Iwa Jima and Cinema Follies stories. It was one of the few times I have seen a group of reporters speechless, as if a UFO had landed and they were trying to come up with the right questions for the first alien interview.

The Mississippi Republican establishment stood by Hinson, including the rising star Trent Lott, the Congressman from Mississippi’s Fifth district. Trent and Jon had been chief of staff to Mississippi Congressmen at the same time and had a natural bond. The district’s major donors, including one of Ronald Reagan’s prominent donors, held firm, moved by a meeting in which Hinson ended it with a prayer asking for forgiveness and strength. I had heard a lot of prayers in my life, but never one pleading for help to overcome being gay to win an election. I imagine God had more important issues than the outcome of an election in Mississippi’s Fourth Congressional District, but it worked. Hinson was reelected.

Later, a prospective client I was pitching in a big governor’s race told me admiringly, “Stevens, anyone can get a heterosexual elected in Mississippi, but it takes talent to win with a homosexual.” He hired me.

A few months into his second term, Jon Hinson was arrested in a men’s bathroom on the sixth floor of the Longworth Building, a floor that then was mainly storage areas. The Congressional police force had heard it was a meeting place for gays and had staked it out, assuming, I would imagine, they would catch only staffers. Instead, they caught a newly reelected Congressman from Mississippi, Jon Hinson, and Massachusetts Congressman Gary Studds. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil protected Studds and kept it quiet. No powerful Republican did likewise for Hinson. He resigned from Congress shortly after his arrest. Years later, he would tragically die of AIDS.

My big consulting break came shortly after when I got a call from a famous and powerful Republican pollster asking if I was interested in working together. It was like being an aspiring starlet plucked from a 1950s Schwaabs drug store stool in Hollywood and asked to screen test for Paramount. I, of course, jumped at the chance.

That call came from Arthur J. Finkelstein, a legendary pollster and strategist who was famed for electing hard-core right-wing candidates like North Carolina’s Jessie Helms. He founded the first major conservative political action committee, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, known as NICPAC. Arthur had installed Terry Dolan as Executive Director, the younger brother of Reagan speechwriter Tony Dolan, credited with the famous “Evil Empire” speech.

Arthur lived in New York at the time. Later, he would move to Massachusetts to take advantage of liberal gay adoption laws, allowing him and his partner to adopt. Terry Dolan would die of AIDS.

At the time, I had no idea of Arthur’s sexual orientation. But I was in the beating heart of the Pink Mafia. My entry into big-time Republican politics had begun.

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