<i> The</i> GENTLEMAN FROM MARYLAND: <i> The Conscience of a Gay Conservative by Robert Bauman (Arbor House: $17.95; 276 pp.)</i>

The Bauman Affair broke late in the summer of 1980, at a time when the sore-pressed Carter Administration sought by any means to sow dissension among its enemies and regain the political high ground. Democrats had few adversaries more effective, or more disagreeable, than Bob Bauman, third-term representative from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, erstwhile founder of Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union, a man whom Richard Viguerie’s “New Right” hailed as “one of the 10 most admired conservatives in Congress.” More than the other nine, Bauman was one mean s.o.b., a brilliant parliamentary tactician known for an abrasive personal style that led even fellow conservatives to call him “self-righteous” and “Elmer Gantry-like.”

One day in September, Bauman received a visit from two FBI agents. They informed him that he had been under investigation for some time, and that it was known that he consorted with young male hustlers whom he transported around the District of Columbia for the purpose of having sex--a federal felony. Shortly thereafter, the Justice Department told Bauman he could fight the charges and risk a jail sentence, or he could plead guilty and receive probation and a suspended sentence. As the government and Bauman well knew, either recourse entailed the probable destruction of his career when the news got out, as it inevitably did.

Bauman argues to extremely good effect that the FBI acted at the instigation of “higher ups.” Very likely the White House gave the word after receiving pressure from House Speaker Tip O’Neill. O’Neill loathed Bauman and regarded him as one of the Right’s most effective paladins. The FBI, like all investigatory agencies of government--like the press for that matter--generally honors the unspoken “Gentleman’s Agreement” and does not hassle the hundreds of homosexual men and women who occupy places in the highest reaches of elective and appointive politics.

Indeed, the very success of the “agreement” as a means of punishment or extortion turns on the fact that it is dishonored only occasionally, only--shall we say--”surgically,” as when a powerful speaker wants to rid himself of a maddening Republican gadfly.

Bauman, a fighter, struggled for a time. He even sought to stand for reelection in 1982 until a vicious, ad hominem primary forced him to retire permanently. Ultimately, he lost more than his career. His wife of nearly two decades left him, taking his four children, leaving Bauman with a large, empty, expensive house, which he presently was forced to sell. Nor, with all the effort in the world, could Bauman land himself a job in government--not even in the right-wing Reagan Administration whose accession Bauman had done so much to prepare. Ultimately Bauman was like a fly caught in a spider web; he died slowly of asphyxiation. Subsequently, he turned into himself to reflect on the life he had lost and the life that was to be. Then, like so many others in such straits, Bauman wrote a book about it.

“The Gentleman From Maryland” makes for relentlessly depressing reading. It is the aching tale of unmet need growing (one could hardly say “being sublimated”) into a vindictive and self-destructive personality. Bauman endured a bitter, lonely childhood in which he was rejected by his adoptive father and sent off, at a young age, to a military school. He emerged from those years determined to wreak a measure of retribution: “I clearly recall making a conscious decision I was going to show a world that did not want me it would have to deal with me someday. I did not need anybody. If I was unloved, I would be respected. I would see to that . . . I did not know it and did not understand it, but denial of my suppressed homosexuality was becoming part of my being.”

Political success and neurotic revenge were far from sweet, however. Barring a decent measure of self-understanding and acceptance, Bauman’s adult life gradually descended into a pageant of self-destruction. One indeed has the impression that the FBI and O’Neill only narrowly won a race with Bauman himself for the man’s ruination. Behind the facade of tough guy, Bauman’s life was a study in compulsion, alcoholism, marital infidelity, and personal profligacy leading to near destitution. (William F. Buckley, who kept his political distance from Bauman, nevertheless showed himself a true friend by sending, unbidden, a loan for $20,000 to the hard-pressed family.) Bauman proved himself an absentee father and an incommunicative, distracted husband, wracked by guilt and self-loathing, but adamant about refusing to acknowledge the suppression at the heart.

In this trait perhaps lies a key to Bauman, an admitted master of self-deception. In the preface, he informs us that the original manuscript he produced contained little if anything that was personal and penetrating. Only the suasion of editors pushed Bauman to the point he has reached. But that point is considerably less advanced in terms of personal reintegration than I suspect Bauman imagines it to be. A recurring theme in the book is that Bauman’s conservative politics was essentially not politics at all but “a desperate effort to create my illusion of self-esteem.” He claims understandably that he doesn’t want to return to public life so much as he wishes to discover “personal peace.” But then in the next breath, he lets slip that as late as last year, he was (for the umpteenth time) petitioning the Reagan Administration for a job. Don’t get me wrong: There is nothing objectionable about a man being at once gay, conservative and a public servant; but not one who himself has informed us all along that his political philosophy is mainly a rigid, unhappy reflection of his neuroses.

Bauman is committed, even now, to principles at apparent odds with his nature. He remains repentantly conservative and Catholic, just as he has become defiantly, if ambivalently, gay. But having barely begun to work out a reconciliation among these antinomies, he is far from being an integrated person. Having been “trapped by the often cruel standards he set for others in the political arena” (in the words of a Bauman critic), Bauman still cleaves to what he calls “the immutable standards by which our lives must be ordered.”

I am far from convinced that Bauman has even come to grips with his homosexuality. He writes that he is “definitely not” among the large majority of homosexuals who would not change their sexual orientation if they could; and he rejects the label “gay” as connoting more pride and membership than he, Bauman, feels comfortable granting. He tries to analyze at some length what he believes to be the pathological origins of his attraction to young men who look like Michelangelo’s David, without stopping to ask whether the attraction is pathological. (Do straight males meditate on the etiology of their attraction to Bo Derek?)

In the last analysis, Bauman puts one in the mind of Georges Clemenceau’s line about Capt. Alfred Dreyfus: “in his judges’ shoes, he would have condemned himself.” Thus with Bob Bauman, one has the uneasy sense that he’d like to have his cake and eat it--i.e., to return to public life pretty much status quo ante , only now being accepted as a gay man, just as Dreyfus wanted to forget about Devil’s Island and the horrors of the “Affaire” and go back to being a soldier and a Jew. Neither man grasps the subtle and radical interrelationship among their nature, their principles and their fate. Bauman implies that he is sorry now that he put the kibosh on an organized gay attempt to pass a fair-housing statute in Baltimore, but denuded of any understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between his political and religious principles, on the one hand, and his public actions, on the other, his being sorry amounts to what the French call a “sword swipe in the water” ( un coupe’ d’epee dans l’eau ).

But not to worry; Bauman has plenty of time, and, whether he likes it or not, plenty of motive, to go on meditating. For his vocation is not what he imagines it to be, even now. In his loneliness and suffering, he will perhaps discover his close kinship with the hero of Anthony Burgess’ “Earthly Powers,” who wrote, “My sexual orientation was the true instigator of my apostasy. God forced me to reject God.” When the work of rejection is finished--and Bauman has only begun--the work of recomposition may believably begin. Not before.