Gay/straight-acting politicians and the film "Outrage." Is the prevalence in higher proportion to the general population and how is that explained?

I’m sticking with your hypothesis: Politics seems to be a massive gay orgy. I haven’t seen the film but I can’t really see why gay people in particular would be interested in politics, its most likely due to the intentions of the filmmaker and a reflection on the fact that if you go looking you’d probably find a whole heap of people from other professions are also gay but act straight.

I saw the film the other night, and while they comment in passing that there do seem to be a lot of gays in Washington D.C. and a lot more gay staffers in politics than in the general population, this is not necessarily true of the legislators themselves—at least that is not what the film-makers claim.

The documentary is about a group of activists who are outing homosexual politicians who attempt to conceal their homosexuality by very vehemently anti-gay public positions and voting records. Most of them, not surprisingly, were Republicans. One thing they make pretty clear is that gay’s worst enemies are self-loathing closeted homosexuals who “run with the hare and hunt with the hounds” as the Australians put it. J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohen (McCarthy’s chief hatchet man) are cases in point.

It is possible, even likely, that homosexuals are disproportionately represented in staff positions, since they can work long hours unencumbered by the demands of family, but even if there are many of them and they are in key positions, the don’t seem to have all that much influence in terms of advancing gay rights.

James Galbraith in The Predator State and Thomas Frank in The Wrecking Crew both argue that there is a particular mindset among Republicans and conservative Democrats that the rules don’t apply to them. So, there may be something about power that potentiates deviance. If you think you are on the side of God and the angels, then whatever you do is okay—but not when the other guy does it. You see this in spades in the three C Street Republicans who were caught cheating on their spouses and putting their mistresses’ family members on the payroll to shut them up, etc. as cases in point. They were all up in arms when Clinton got his cigar smoked on company time; but they don’t practice what they preach.

I think it might be easier for Democrats to admit to minor sexual deviance since they don’t hold themselves out to be, and nobody expects them to be, holier than thou.

Politicians tend to brag about “Family Values”. And the more they brag about it, the more sexually promiscuous they tend to be, be it with others of the same sex, or a different sex, or a different species.

That is why Republicans tend to have lots of meth-using same-sex lovers. Because they are “anti-drug” and “pro-family” publicly. They are the firefighters who moonlight as arsonists.

And you are right about the cult-like sexual situations they get themselves involved in. It’s no secret that these “Christian Family Men” in power, gather every year at Bohemian Grove, to run around naked and drunk, while performing copulation on hired male porn stars.

I haven’t seen the movie, but aside from openly gay politicians looking to make a change I would assume gay people aren’t more predisposed to politics than straight folks. It may simply be that the percentage of closeted gay folks is higher than assumed, in and out of politics.