HUFFINGTON
09.30.12
THE PINK ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
be hard-pressed to use the word
“happy” at such an event. The
majority of Republican leaders
in Congress are still opposed to
same-sex marriage, gay antidiscrimination laws and gay
hate-crime laws; and not only
has Romney personally pledged
to ban gay marriage, but he’s also
vowed to appoint judges committed to protecting that legacy. To
quote Evan Wolfson, head of the
nonpartisan same-sex advocacy
group Freedom To Marry, “Generally speaking, the Republican
Party has been horrible.”
While some on the left, including Wolfson, feel that Log
Cabin’s tactics could bolster
the work of gay rights activists in both parties, others are
far less gracious in their judgements. Barney Frank, never one
to mince words, has repeatedly
compared them to Uncle Toms.
“I’ll be honest,” Frank said in
an interview at the Democratic
National Convention with Michelangelo Signorile, a radio
host and Huffington Post editor. “For 20 years now I’ve heard
how the Log Cabins are going to
make Republicans better, but
they’ve only gotten worse.” As
for GOProud, he later belittled
the “oddly-named” group as Log
Cabin’s “outlandish cousins.”
“IT WILL
BE AWESOME”
A day after Cooper’s opening remarks, the leaders of GOProud
sat in a hotel room a good hour
from the convention site, frenetically preparing for their event the
next night. LaSalvia, who wears
his golden hair in a swooping,
glossy side-part and whose curedleather face makes John Boehner
look almost pale, glanced up from
his phone and announced that a
New York Post gossip reporter had
RSVP’d in the affirmative. Barron, who is tall and angular with
an action-hero jaw-line, said, “I’m
not saying this because this is our
event, but it will be awesome.”
Barron and LaSalvia met in
2004, when they were both still
Log Cabin members. When the previous director left in 2008, they
both made a run for the executive
leadership position. Neither succeeded, however, and the post sat
empty for more than two years, until Cooper began his term in 2010.
No one in Tampa seemed more
interested in talking about Cooper
than LaSalvia and Barron. As they