If it hadn't been for the sex scandal that torpedoed his political career, Bob Bauman might have gone down in history as a run-of-the-mill Republican tightwad with a fetish for offshore tax avoidance. Instead, in 1980, an FBI investigation revealed that the Maryland congressman and married father of four had been drunkenly cruising the streets of Washington, DC, behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental with congressional plates, picking up men and paying them for sex. At least one of the men turned out to be a boy of 16. Bauman was far from exceptional as a closeted gay man in DC, but he was exceptional as a closeted gay man who was widely considered one of the most conservative members of Congress…
Like many of the men involved in the early days of the Hyde Amendment, Bauman was a devout Catholic…
