Michael Huffington secret unveiled: He's gay

WASHINGTON - Michael Huffington, the man who spent $28 million on a failed Senate candidacy in California, says now that he's glad he lost because it has allowed him to reveal a long-held personal secret: He's gay.

"I know now that my sexuality is part of who I am," Huffington is quoted as saying in an article by David Brock, a longtime friend, in the January issue of Esquire. He added, "I've been through a long process of finding out the truth about me."

Huffington, 51, was divorced last year from columnist and socialite Arianna Huffington. The article says he told his fiancee of his past homosexual activity before they were married.

Huffington, who lives in Los Angeles, sent word through Brock that he is not giving interviews.

The news of Huffington's sexual orientation came as a shock to some in the Bay Area's gay community.

Tom Ammiano, president-elect of the Board of Supervisors, couldn't help but giggle when he heard that the Republican was gay: "I'm speechless. This certainly comes out of left field."

"I just can't envision him hanging around the Castro," added Ammiano, saying he didn't know whether the gay community would embrace Huffington.

The supervisor said he now hoped Huffington would use his money to fund programs that support gays and lesbians.

This past summer Huffington donated $140,000 to the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California for a new program to study sexual orientation and the media, said Roy Aarons, director of the program and founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

Aarons said Huffington had been very enthusiastic about the program and jumped at the opportunity to support it.

"Michael said he opposed discrimination of any kind and wanted to use his resources to fight it," said Aarons, who added that he didn't know of Huffington's sexual orientation, though he had heard rumors circulating on the Internet that he was bisexual.

"When I told my gay friends that Huffington was supporting the program," Aarons added, "they all said, "Really!' "

Using Huffington's donations, Aarons said he is creating two classes on gay-related issues in the media and doing independent research on the subject.

There is no small irony in the decision by the former Republican congressman, a staunch conservative, to tell his story to Brock. A fellow conservative, Brock struggled with the decision to disclose his own homosexuality in a 1994 interview with the Washington Post. Brock is best known for the "Troopergate" article about President Clinton's sex life in Arkansas, for which he has since apologized.

Brock says Huffington first broached the subject while visiting Brock at his Rehoboth Beach, Del., home last Memorial Day weekend, and later raised it as a possible magazine article.

"I told him I didn't want to be compromised and the fact that we're friends couldn't get in the way of my doing this piece as a journalist," Brock said.

Brock said he interviewed Huffington for more than 20 hours. "It's extremely painful and difficult for him even to talk to me about it," Brock said. "He didn't blurt all this out in the first 15 minutes."

Yet, he concluded, "Michael Huffington wants you to know that he's happy now. Really, really happy. He's become Greek Orthodox. He's selling his film-production company. Not really cut out for it."

Also, he confesses he never really believed he was cut out to be in the oil business. It was in that capacity, in Houston, in the 1970s, that he began to date men, although he did not go to gay bars or the like.

According to the Esquire piece, Huffington says he began dating men in the 1970s while working at his family oil company in Houston, and became "guilt-ridden and depressed" over the relationships. A relationship with one man lasted about a year, he said. Huffington also continued to date women, and at one point he made a private vow to stop sleeping with men.

The article also says the former congressman and oil tycoon draws a distinction between gay and homosexual.

"He doesn't seem gay to himself," Brock writes. "Gay means so much more, carries so much cultural baggage and he's not that. The word gay just doesn't describe him. It really doesn't.

"But he is homosexual" Brock said. "It wasn't a choice; it can't be changed. Lord knows, he tried."

The Huffingtons were married in 1986. Six years later, in what was the most expensive House race in history, Michael Huffington spent $5.4 million to win his California seat.

Huffington also served one term in Congress from Santa Barbara County, but Brock's article says he found the work boring and realized he wasn't a politician.

Yet he still decided to run for U.S. Senate.

Huffington was one of the few Republicans to support an end to the ban on gays in the military, but said at the time that he was not voting to "promote the gay lifestyle."

He also voted for an amendment blocking the District of Columbia from spending money on a domestic partners program. He received relatively low marks from the Human Rights Campaign Fund, a gay and lesbian political group.

Even so, David Smith, a spokesman for the campaign, said:

"It doesn't come as a shock to me. Huffington's voting record isn't really anti-gay."

Huffington drew national attention in his hugely expensive, harshly negative 1994 attempt to unseat Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Huffington, who opposed the anti-immigrant initiative known as Proposition 187, was badly hurt by the disclosure that his wife had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Arianna Huffington played a prominent role in the campaign.

After his Senate loss, the couple remained in their $4 million Washington home for two years. Huffington began seeking out men at some of his wife's parties, the article says, but nothing came of it. The couple and their two daughters returned to California at the end of 1996, and were divorced a few months later.

Brock said he agreed not to seek comment from Arianna Huffington as a condition of the interviews. She said Saturday night, "I wish Michael well. All that matters to me is that he's a good father to our children."

One other revelation in the article: Huffington says he is not sure if he is a Republican anymore, and that he will never run for political office again.<