Marvin Liebman - Coming Out

Coming Out

In July 1990, Liebman shed a lifetime of closeted living after writing a coming-out letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., who was then editor-in-chief of the National Review. "I am almost 67 years old," he told Buckley. "For more than half my lifetime I have been engaged in, and indeed helped to organize and maintain, the conservative and anti-communist cause...the Conservative Party of New York...the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns...All the time I labored in the conservative vineyard I was gay." Liebman's personal letter to Buckley was followed up by an interview printed in The Advocate where he expressed his disgust at the increasing influence of the Religious Right within the Republican Party as the Cold War came to an end. He believed that homophobia was becoming the new basis for organizing conservative groups in the U.S., now that anti-communist sentiments were becoming less relevant.

His autobiography, Coming Out Conservative, was published in 1992. In the book, he said that within the Republican Party he'd begun to "feel like a Jew in Germany in 1934 who had chosen to remain silent, hoping to be able to stay invisible as he watched the beginning of the Holocaust." Over the next five years he became an outspoken advocate of gay and lesbian rights in the U.S., writing numerous articles and traveling the country to speak at various meetings and rallies.

• Liebman at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.

• Liebman in his DC home in 1993 during interview with activist Larry Kramer.

Although he initially labeled himself a moderate Republican and worked to support gay-friendly conservative groups, including Log Cabin Republicans, he eventually concluded that he could no longer self-identify as a fund raiser for or supporter of any conservative group because of the increasingly anti-gay rhetoric of the political right. Liebman also later renounced his ties to Catholicism. In the final years of his life, he chose to describe himself as an "independent".

He died of heart failure on March 31, 1997.