A Gay Man Comes to Terms With Private, Political Lives

Brian O’Leary Bennett served dutifully for 12 years as an aide to U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan, one of the most strident voices in the country against homosexual rights.

While Dornan angrily condemned homosexuals as sodomites and pedophiles, Bennett until 1989 was a loyal confidant and eventually chief of staff to his boss, whom he admired for his conservative views, opposition to abortion and strong Catholic faith.

All the while, though, he agonized over his own feelings that he might be gay. He confessed those fears to his priest, but not to Dornan.

Over the years since he left Dornan’s office, Bennett realized he had to tell the truth. In the past 18 months, he has confided to a select few that he’s gay, and more recently moved into a vintage 1926 clapboard home in Long Beach with his partner, Rick.

This month, the 41-year-old Bennett takes his private life even more public. He is scheduled to join the board of directors of ONE of Long Beach Inc., which operates the Long Beach Gay & Lesbian Community Center and AIDS Project Long Beach.

Bennett, now an executive at Edison Co., the state’s largest utility, agreed to tell his story to The Times because he believes it will lessen the risk of someone “outing” him, and help other gay conservatives struggling with their identities.

“I was in the mind-set of working for Bob Dornan for so long that I was a horrible, horrible person,” Bennett said. “I felt my family wouldn’t love me if I told them. I was terrified to tell my friends in politics. I thought all of my years in politics would be wiped off the screen and all they’d see is Brian Bennett, the homosexual.”

Bennett told Dornan the news on Feb. 23, 1996. Both remember the exact date.

The pair had met in Newport Beach to go out for dinner, where Bennett planned to tell Dornan the truth he’d wrestled with since they’d met 20 years before. Dornan and his son, Mark, arrived with an entourage, so Bennett arranged to drive Dornan home.

“We were sitting at a stoplight and I said, ‘Poppy’--I was very nervous--’You know I love you very much. I have something very important to tell you,’ ” Bennett said. “I said, ‘I’m gay.’

“There was a pause that seemed like an hour and then he reached over, put his arm around me and kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘I’ve loved you like a son for 20 years. Did you think this would make any difference?’ ”

Dornan said the news hit him “like a ton of bricks.” He counseled Bennett to attend Catholic Mass daily to overcome his homosexuality, which Dornan believes is a sin in the eyes of God.

“He’s run up against an immovable object with me, but it has nothing to do with my feelings for Brian,” Dornan said. “The love will be there forever. But the debate he wants to enter into [about homosexuality] is a debate he cannot win.”

Dornan said Bennett has sacrificed a career in politics: “You know he has no future in the Republican Party in Orange County.” Dornan also believes that Bennett has forfeited the possibility of ever becoming a father, for a lifestyle he sees as nothing more than a phase.

“It’s like Ellen DeGeneres,” Dornan said of the actress who announced recently that she is a lesbian. “She cannot continue to play an all-American character. Everything she does now, she has limited her options. Brian has also limited his options in life.”

Bennett’s mother, Barbara, said she’s relieved for her son.

“He wouldn’t love himself if he didn’t take this next step. It’s like his destiny,” she said. “Maybe this will force people like Congressman Dornan to think twice before they condemn other people. Hate is such a terrible thing.”

Bennett went to work for Dornan in January 1977. The 21-year-old immediately bonded with the sprawling Dornan clan, so like his own family, where 21 Bennett cousins grew up on the same Long Island street.

He became Dornan’s chief of staff in Washington, accompanying the congressman to Ethiopia, Haiti, Colombia and Bolivia. He ran campaigns with Dornan’s wife, Sallie. Dornan referred to the trio as “the triumvirate” and “the Comeback Kids” after he moved from Santa Monica and won his central Orange County seat from Democrat Jerry Patterson in 1984.

But Bennett also had his own political aspirations. He was among those considered to replace Long Beach Assemblyman Richard Longshore on the GOP ticket in 1988 after Longshore died. Bennett was Dornan’s heir apparent when Dornan briefly considered running in a neighboring district in 1992. He was a state Senate candidate in 1993 but bowed out before the election.

In late 1995, Bennett turned down Dornan’s request to run his 1996 presidential campaign. By then, Bennett had fallen in love and didn’t want the campaign exposed to possible scandal. And he wasn’t ready to tell Dornan he was gay.

“It was all of these day-to-day things, these collective experiences that eat at you because you’re living a lie and you’re not being honest with the people you love,” he said. “It was eating me up inside. I was pretty close in 1995 to having a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I knew I was on a spiral to nowhere and I had to change my life.”

Among the first people Bennett confided in were his older brother, Bobby, and his cousin, Kathi Weissberger. Weissberger said the family immediately accepted Bennett for all the things he is--Republican, conservative, opposed to abortion, gay.

“All of us always felt that Brian was supposed to make a difference in the world,” said Weissberger, 43, a Democrat, like Bennett’s mother. “There are a lot of conservative Republicans who suffer in silence who happen to be gay. Maybe this will encourage them.”

Bennett said he never would have been able to confront his homosexuality while working in Dornan’s office. While it gave him “a cover”--no one questioned why he wasn’t married while he worked 18-hour days--he still was surrounded by images of homosexuals as sinners and molesters.

“I thought that being around Bob and Sallie Dornan would help me,” Bennett said. “I thought they would be a good influence on me. I was terrified about my feelings for men. I thought, ‘Whatever these feelings are, I can beat them.’ ”

Dornan’s views on homosexuality became a prominent public issue locally in 1988 when a gay-rights activist, Jeff LeTourneau, confronted the congressman at a town hall meeting. LeTourneau had been escorted out of the hall once, but got back in. When he confronted Dornan again, Sallie Dornan shouted, “Shut up, fag!”

Dornan said he found out later it was Bennett who let LeTourneau back in the meeting. He wondered now if Bennett had an ulterior motive for doing so.

Bennett wonders himself.

“Jeff had promised to behave if I let him back in and I took him at his word,” Bennett said. “I may have looked at Jeff at that point in my life and said, ‘He’s fighting for me.’ ”

Dornan’s tirades against gays are legendary. During his successful 1992 race, he said that “every lesbian spear-chucker in the country is hoping I get defeated.”

He also criticized a fund-raiser held by last year’s opponent, Loretta Sanchez, calling its organizers--the partners of three openly gay U.S. congressman--”sodomites.” Sanchez defeated Dornan by 984 votes in the November election, but Dornan is contesting the results.

When Bennett was asked to join the board of the Long Beach gay and lesbian organization, Bennett jumped at it, particularly because the board acknowledged that it wanted to reach out to gay conservatives.

Bennett’s partner, Rick, who has asked that his last name not be published so he can maintain his privacy, said accepting the challenge and going public is a big step, but only one in a series of big steps for Bennett. In many ways, Rick said it was easier for him, being both African American and gay, to be accepted in society than Bennett, a Catholic and conservative white Republican.

“I love him,” Rick said. “He’s a wonderful person and he’s been through a lot. I’m really proud of him for the steps he’s taken to confront his fears. That has caused so many of us for so many years of our lives to be afraid of who we really are.”

Bennett said he plans to continue to be active in Republican politics, to persuade other conservatives that it’s possible to be true to one’s politics and oneself.

Bennett said he and Dornan still talk frequently and the former congressman often solicits his views. More than once, he has asked Dornan to tone down his anti-gay vitriol, including the night he first told Dornan he was gay.

“I said ‘Poppy, for all these years, I’ve stood by you and heard all these horrible things out of your mouth about people like me,’ ” he said. “‘You’ve called us pedophiles, sodomites, molesters. Those things hurt, and I want you to stop it. I wouldn’t ask you to change your views. I’m saying get rid of the meanness. Get rid of the hurt in promoting your position.’

“He said he would.”

But Dornan has continued to attack the gay community.

“The cutting edge of homosexuality is not Brian Bennett, who loves his religion and his faith,” Dornan said. “It’s the others, who demand of us what they cannot give themselves--dignity and self-respect. Brian thinks this is a gift, and I think it’s an ax. I believe the twain shall meet one day.”