Steve Gobie lifts the lid on the Capital City’s secret X-rated netherworld.
Sex and Politics — The Shame Balance
You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above, if you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love.Bruce Springsteen
It was his favorite song when he was riding high, careening through an Xrated “Tunnel of Love,” working as a pricey cupid for hire, serving up men, women, couples, and himself for the assorted bedroom fantasies sought by the politically powerful and well-connected who prowl Washington’s sexual demimonde. Sandy-haired and trim, his jaded blue eyes blaze charm and cunning when he chooses to pour it on.
“There’s a lot of wild stuff going on right around the corner from the White House and Congress,” says Steve Gobie, 33, the male prostitute and “madam” who became the paid lover of Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and ran an out-call prostitution ring from the congressman’s Capitol Hill apartment between 1985 and 1987.
Indeed, Gobie’s ads in the personals column of a gay newspaper, The Washington Blade, billed him as a top stud whose “hot bottom plus large endowment equals a good time.” Frank admits answering one of Gobie’s ads, the opening gambit of a torrid 18-month relationship that has shaken this capital city to its core.
This is Washington, D.C., where lust affects politics and history. Where some pay a high price for passion — just ask Gary Hart. Where private peccadilloes can become public with a bang. When the House ethics committee decided to investigate Frank’s affair with Gobie, he was added to a list of wayward colleagues pending investigation.
The list included Congressman Donald E. “Buz” Lukens, the Ohio Republican convicted of having sex with a 16-year-old girl; Congressman Gus Savage, an Illinois Democrat who allegedly molested a female Peace Corps volunteer in a limousine during a fact-finding junket to Africa; and Congressman Jim Bates, a California Democrat accused of sexually harassing female staff members.
Late last year, in a five-hour secret session with the ethics committee, Gobie was questioned intensively about his involvement with Frank and, in fact, about the revelations contained in this exclusive Penthouse report. His appearance — compelled by subpoena — was an extraordinary event that illustrates the thin line separating sex and politics in the nation’s capital.
Washington, D.C. — a city where the bedroom often serves as a setting for scandal. Where sex and national security can be a volatile mix, and where sex is sometimes used as a powerful weapon in high-stakes games of espionage and influence peddling.
It’s a tranquil city on the surface, and political manners are de rigueur by day, when public rituals are religiously observed. But after hours, beyond the media’s glare, pleasure seekers never know who’s watching. They never know who’s going to kiss and tell, or seduce and blackmail.
“I don’t think there’s any question that the G.R.U. or the K.G.B. will try to target homosexuals,” says former F.B.I. assistant director Ray Wannall, who once worked alongside late director J. Edgar Hoover. “The Soviets watch watering holes in Georgetown and Capitol Hill. And the F.B.I. keeps an eye on the places that are known to be concentrated on by foreign intelligence agents.”
If that’s the case, the two dozen or so closeted gays in Congress can count on a little extra company when and if they choose to spend a night on the town.
Since Gobie went public, following the bust of another homosexual out-call prostitution service last year, the names of at least nine gay members of Congress — some of whom, like Barney Frank, are said to have paid for sex — have circulated furiously through Washington’s rumor mill. Gay-rights activists and Democratic party bosses wince at Frank’s behavior, while others point to Frank as a hypocritical point man who, with a rapier tongue, denounces those conservatives whose transgressions he deplores.
If battle lines are being drawn, Washington is certainly nervous about it. Scandals in Congress last year marked a session that was long on sleaze and short on legislation. And when it comes to personal behavior, for both parties the gloves are off. Last spring, a Republican National Committee memorandum questioned the sexual orientation of Democrat Tom Foley, the new House Speaker. Who will be next?
“Do I need to warn any of my colleagues? Is he [Gobie] going to name anyone else?” a nervous senator asked us over a buffet lunch of mahi-mahi in the exclusive Senate dining room. Surrounded by a few on the Gay Rumor List who were lunching nearby, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m divorced, but, you know, I like women.”
In Washington, such paranoia is often justified. Gobie and his professional colleagues gossip about the midwestern senator who married an attractive woman for political reasons; the call boys of Washington nicknamed him “Telephone Pole,” referring to one generous asset.
“One week after Spence let Penthouse know that he might be willing to provide details of Washington’s bisexual political wonderland, he was found dead.”
Then there’s the gray-haired bisexual senator with a penchant for boys. And the Reagan White House staffer who Gobie says ordered from his menu — at least he chose women.
Then there was the promiscuous AIDS-infected lobbyist who arranged midnight tours of the Reagan White House for clients and call boys to impress those he was courting. Gobie told Penthouse he sexually serviced that lobbyist, Craig Spence, three times. Gobie watched him snort cocaine and then do sit-ups as he hung upside down, half-naked, in gravity boots. (Gobie says he tests negative for the AIDS virus.)
Spence was under federal investigation for the possible engineering of national security breaches by using, as bait, men and women from another primarily male out-call service. But on November 10, 1989, one week after Spence relayed to Penthouse that he might be willing to provide lurid details of Washington’s bisexual political wonderland, he was found dead in his hotel room at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, stylish to the very end in a black tuxedo, white suspenders, and white bow tie. An apparent suicide, say police.
While blackmail for business gain — sex for political access — was the game Gobie claims Spence was recruiting him to play as a sex commando, there are times when prostitution actually enjoys government sanction. A former senior Senate aide says he once discovered a $3 million entertainment slush fund in the State Department budget for visiting foreign dignitaries. The money was made available after a visit by Jordan’s King Hussein, the former official told Penthouse.
American intelligence agents were dismayed to learn that the king’s aides were risking violence and embarrassment on Washington’s mean streets by picking up gaudy streetwalkers.
“The concern was not only that one of these foreign leaders could be victimized by crime or disease, but also that they might talk loosely about their business” with Washington hookers cooperating for cash with Eastern bloc spies. says the former Senate staffer. “There was reason to believe there had been hostile intelligence-service penetration of some of the [out-call] services available at that time,” he said.
For that reason, officials ruled it more prudent to spend tax dollars on highclass prostitutes who would be loyal to America — and had been previously checked out. But the government wasn’t thorough enough.
According to one high-priced call girl who was there, an Arab delegation in Washington to buy weapons from the Pentagon celebrated one recent Thanksgiving with a private party. Eight call girls were dispatched from New York, she said. But underneath their sequined gowns and feather boas, four of the more ostentatious hookers were transsexuals. They were the ones picked to stay for a second night.
In Washington, sex, like politics, comes in many flavors. “We’ve got exhibitionists, cross-dressers, and anonymous callers,” says Lois Valaderos, a therapist with the Human Sexuality Institute. “There are sexual addicts all over Washington.”
On the surface Washington is a “fantasy” city, she says, as public figures projecting purity and family values are fawned over by “adoring masses… Some develop a ‘God complex.’ But there is so much stress and pressure, it can get out of control,” leading to dangerous, furtive cruising.
Underneath it all, as Steve Gobie knows so well, there is another Washington, where secret obsessions are explored under cover of darkness, where sexual yearning and loneliness can explode into self-destructive behavior and tawdry headlines — even for the rich and powerful.
From his days catering to both men and women with varied sexual tastes, Gobie’s exclusive revelations to Penthouse include:
- How his part-time lover and mentor, Congressman Barney Frank, swooned at a congressional-staff softball game over one Adonis-like player on the Massachusetts delegation — blue-blooded heterosexual Congressman Joe Kennedy. “Look at that body,” Gobie says Frank lusted with a laugh. “I’d do it with him in a minute.”
- How Frank phoned home before leaving his Capitol Hill office to make certain Gobie or his prostitutes had finished turning tricks in his bed, and then dashed home to delight over the soiled sheets on which they had frolicked.
“Barney would call and ask, ‘are you entertaining company?’” a former female prostitute who worked for Gobie told Penthouse. “And I’d say, ‘Yeah, but they’re about to leave.’ And he’d say, ‘I’ll give you 20 or 25 minutes.’”
Frank calls Gobie’s claim that he condoned, or even had knowledge of, the prostitution ring in his apartment “a total lie,” claiming that he was “suckered” by the prostitute he hoped to reform by hiring him as a chauffeur and aide, protesting further to the media that he ordered Gobie to relocate and broke off their dealings after his landlord alerted him to the brothel in his basement.
However, at least four month’s later, Gobie was still using Frank’s car for personal errands, including a jaunt to buy cocaine and a trip to New York with a young woman.
- How, on New Year’s Day, 1986, in the silence of the empty House gymnasium, Frank and Gobie, naked in the shower like a pair of naughty adolescents, snapped each other with towels, and then began masturbating — ejaculating into the open locker of then vicepresident George Bush. Gobie says he was reluctant, but Frank reassured him.
“I said, ‘I wonder if this kind of thing ever happened in here before.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, it happens all the time.’” Frank has denied that, too, and further declined to comment on any aspect of this story.
- How Frank wanted to participate in a paid ménage — “threesome, foursome, or more-some” —if he could be certain that his identity would remain secret. “Barney said, ‘I think it would be a thrill to be paid for sex.’” However, that fantasy was never fulfilled.
- How one influential Washington political columnist liked to snort cocaine and masturbate while describing his sexual fantasies to Gobie.
- How airline pilots staying in a motel near National Airport would pig out on cocaine and sex. Says Gobie, “I’ve seen pilots on a cocaine binge, after screwing all night, go from the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge right to the cockpit.”
- How one female client liked to have sex with Gobie in the backseat of Frank’s car while parked in a cemetery on rainy afternoons. It was the same car used by Gobie for his late-night out-calls, during which he accumulated dozens of parking tickets. He says his congressional benefactor fixed more than 50 tickets — Frank admits fixing a few — by claiming that the car was on official congressional business when he was well aware of Gobie’s profession.
- How Craig Spence bragged about bugging his own party guests and tried to enlist Gobie to blackmail Washington VIPs with sex and drugs. “Do you know the kind of power you can have over people if you’ve got something on them?” Gobie remembers Spence saying.
- How Frank refused to get an AIDS test. “He said, ‘What would you do about sex then?’” Gobie recalls. “He didn’t want to be put in a moral dilemma.” Gobie says that Frank performed anal sex without a condom on at least one male prostitute who was procured by Gobie for gay sex acts that he refused to do. Frank has admitted hiring other call boys, but declines to discuss his sexual habits.
- “If I were working, I could hustle him in a minute,” smirks Steve Gobie, returning the timid glance of a balding man two tables away in the smoky gay bar.
It’s late October 1989, 2 A.M. at the seedy Chesapeake House in downtown Washington, as Gobie, now in retirement, escorts two reporters about the Other Side of Washington. After dark, parts of the nation’s capital become a netherworld of homosexual hot spots secretly frequented by some of the city’s most uptight, image-conscious powercrats — or used as a pickup joint by anonymous loyal aides, according to one former Republican congressman who still frequents that world.
Do celebrities with so much to lose dare drop in to such a dive, where wideeyed men ogle a half-dozen nude male dancers pumping erections to the beat of blaring rock music?
“AII the time,” says a waiter who asked that his name not be used. “Why shouldn’t they? Who’s going to notice, except someone just like them?”
The F.B.I., for one. K.G.B. agents, for another. And in a bizarre scenario of spy versus spy on the Potomac, Neil Livingstone, a counter-terrorism expert, says the good guys sometimes watch the bad guys searching for prey. “If the F.B.I. catches officials committing egregious behavior, they might quietly warn them.”
Indeed, it was the F.B.I. that noticed then-closeted Republican Congressman Robert Bauman ten years ago when he was cruising for young men in the dimly lit bar of the Chesapeake House. To family and voters, Bauman played the loyal conservative, a married father of four whose political philosophy marched in lockstep with the emerging Moral Majority.
But after dark, Bauman desperately pursued his private obsession — muscular young men for furtive, anonymous sex in the back alleys of the nation’s capital — risking it all. Not even two beatings, fear of exposure, or his Catholic guilt stopped him.
But Bauman fell from political grace, defeated for reelection when — several weeks before Election Day — it was reported that he’d paid a 16-year-old male nude dancer at the Chesapeake House $50 for sex.
“… there are many men in leading positions of power who are homosexuals and yet appear regularly in the media as the leaders of our nation,” Bauman reflected after his downfall. “Some are close friends of the President [Reagan]… Some regularly appear in public as leaders of the conservative movement, and some few even resort to the hypocritical tactic of attacking homosexuality and gay people in their public role.
“Later the same day,” Bauman continued, “they retire to bed with another male after spending an hour or two at a gay bar.”
It was into this world of risky business that Barney Frank stepped after scouring the gay classified ads for a rent-astud. But what began as a one-hour stand with Gobie turned into a costly, dangerous liaison.
Washington’s most recent season of scandal opened February 28, 1989, when police and Secret Service agents broke down the door of a Washington home rented by 28-year-old funeral director Henry Vinson. He is the son of a West Virginia coal miner who came to the big city, where, police charged in court records, he ran primarily gay outcall prostitution services under the names “Man to Man.” “Jack’s Jocks,” and “Dream Boys.” Vinson denied these charges.
Neighbors on the quiet, tree-lined street near the exclusive residential enclave of Chevy Chase had wondered why dark limousines sometimes pulled up to Vinson’s house and why so many people came and went from the residence at all hours. But the bust went largely unnoticed by the media until last summer.
Soon The Washington Times, using computerized client lists found by police and reporters who had been invited along for the Vinson bust, hyped a page-one story under the bold headline “Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Bush, Reagan.” Once again, the drums of scandal began to beat in Washington.
Vinson’s most curious client was Craig Spence, who, in addition to being a lobbyist. was a haughty, social-climbing ex-foreign correspondent with a petite Maltese dog named Winston. A former stringer for ABC Radio, he’d hit town in 1979 from Tokyo, carving out a recent gig as lobbyist for a Tokyo-based nonprofit group that aimed to bring Japanese executives together with influential Americans.
Quickly, from a rented Georgian mansion, he set out to establish a political salon to attract the best and the brightest of the incoming Reagan administration. But in a town of hidden agendas, Spence soon developed an outrageous one of his own — to hustle friends, cultivate information, and influence the powerful. Among his clients was a Japanese group that is considered a major intelligence conduit for that country’s government and business interests.
Brazen social climbing led one journalist to observe that “Spence doesn’t so much drop names as heave them bodily,” and many A-list Washingtonians wound up wandering around his home asking one another why they’d been invited.
Among his guests: Eric Sevareid; Ted Koppel, who knew Spence when he was an ABC correspondent in Vietnam more than 20 years ago; Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; ex-attorney general John Mitchell; right-wing columnist Phyllis Schlafly; New York Times columnist William Satire; and a host of other celebrities from the worlds of politics, journalism, academia, and diplomacy.
In recent years, however, friends noticed Spence’s behavior growing increasingly bizarre, as he adopted the persona of a Marine drill instructor, recruiting macho young military men as personal aides. One real estate agent who worked for Spence told Penthouse that he sometimes answered the telephone, “This is God. Speak!” Spence intimated that he worked for the C.I.A. telling close friends that their conversations in his home were bugged.
At parties guests reported that Spence retreated to his bedroom for unusually long periods, and that he only traveled by limo with squads of beefy bodyguards carrying walkie-talkies crackling code names.
Spence was obsessed with death, according to a former television correspondent who had worked with him in Vietnam. And then last summer news reports revealed that Spence had spent as much as $20,000 a month procuring men and women from alleged pimp Henry Vinson. The Secret Service was especially interested in any alleged credit-card fraud involving prostitution — and two uniformed Secret Service officers stationed at the White House who allowed Spence and his friends to take midnight tours.
One guard admitted receiving a Rolex watch from Spence and gifting him with a piece of Truman china taken from the White House. Last June, as the story began to unravel, Craig Spence mysteriously vanished from the Washington scene, even as Secret Service agents were questioning his friends about Spence’s probes for information concerning America’s anti-terrorist commando unit, Delta Force.
Then all of a sudden, Spence surfaced in late July in New York, where he was arrested with a 22-year-old call boy at the Barbizon Hotel. He was charged with possession of a loaded gun and a small amount of crack. In a rambling interview with reporters from The Washington Times, he caressed a doubleedged razor blade, talked suicide, and blamed the discovery in 1986 that he had AIDS for his descent into the world of male prostitutes and cocaine.
“How do you think a little faggot like me moved in the circles I did? It’s because I had contacts at the highest levels of this government,” he boasted.
One longtime associate recalled Spence saying, “I don’t need you. I have new friends.” Perhaps he was talking about Steve Gobie.
Following last year’s bust of Henry Vinson’s 34th Place NW out-call operation, Gobie says he decided to go public after learning that others were about to reveal his prominent role in the world of Washington prostitution — he saw a way to play spin doctor and peddle his own raunchy story in the scandal marketplace.
“I thought it was going to come out in a way that I would have no control over,” he says. “So this way at least I could try to control it, and make sure accurate information got out.”
Until now, however, Gobie has said that he was trying to keep personally embarrassing information about Frank under wraps, out of loyalty. But Gobie says he no longer feels any obligation now that Frank has taken off the gloves and trashed him.
“Gobie says that Congressman Barney Frank swooned over blue-blooded, heterosexual Congressman Joe Kennedy. “I’d do him in a minute,” Gobie says Frank told him.”
By Gobie’s account, he spent his high school years rebelling and dealing drugs in suburban Springfield, Virginia. He was the second of four children born to a former English actress and a Marine Corps master sergeant and ex-drill instructor.
Gobie remembers an unhappy childhood marked by rigid discipline as his family traveled from base to base. In 1974 he was expelled from high school halfway through his senior year because, he says, he was the biggest drug dealer on campus.
One year later, his rap sheet blossomed. Court records show that he was convicted of marijuana possession, and later that year, he scored a five-year suspended sentence for selling cocaine. He enrolled in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist college in North Carolina, the only place that would take him, as a way to transfer to the nearby college of a girlfriend. “It didn’t work out,” he said. So he withdrew, but not until he’d taught “Partying 101” to wide-eyed innocents.
Home again by 1978, Gobie was 21 when, by his account, “an elegant older woman in her forties” approached him at a Washington department store. “She said, ‘Have you ever done any modeling?’” They did lunch, where she mused, “’There are some types of modeling work that pay $50 to $100 an hour.’ I said, ‘What? Nude modeling?’ And she said, ‘Sort of.’”
He was curious now, so she went on, detailing the secret desires of the wives of the rich and powerful, among them Washington women ignored by workaholic or philandering husbands. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he said. “I’m only 21. I don’t know if I’ve got enough social graces.”
But after sampling the merchandise, the older woman told the younger man, “Don’t worry, you’ve got all the basics. I can teach you what you’ll need to know.”
So Gobie became her star, forever grateful.
At his madam’s urging, he bought a custom 1969 Corvette to squire his clients about, counting 300 to 400 women as satisfied clients since that time. Gradually, he began to include men in his repertoire. He worked as a male model, then for other gay out-call services before launching his own operation offering both men and women. He teamed up with a bisexual female horse-trainer from tony Potomac, Maryland; they performed as a couple.
“I was the first one in Washington,” he boasts, “to combine the gay and straight escort world. I had people I could call for any combination you could think of” — women for straight sex with men; men for women; men for men; women for lesbians; a couple to play straight kinky sex with men; the same couple for kinkier bisexual scenes with men who relished both men and women.
How was Gobie able to perform for both sexes if, as he claims, he’s neither gay nor bisexual, but prefers women?
“Doing men,” he says, “is just business. It’s a lot of acting out their fantasies, psyching myself up to be what they want me to be tor an hour; but a lot of it involves just talking and being nice. But like with Barney, and a lot of others, there were things I would not do, like anal sex, or perform oral sex on them, and I’d tell them up front. In my mind, whether I’m gay or bi or whatever is a joke to me. Not that I care what people think I am for my image. Anyone who knows me knows I love women.”
But if women remain his passion, they have also become his nemesis. It was a young woman who triggered his most serious criminal charge. In 1982, while Gobie was working as a desk clerk in a suburban motel, he says a sweet young thing dressed to kill entered the lobby and began flirting. A short relationship ensued, including steamy sessions where he snapped nude pictures of her with his Polaroid. There was one photo of her performing oral sex on him. Meanwhile, he partied with suburban cocaine dealers, who paid him in drugs for storing their inventory.
Acting on a tip, police raided the hotel room where Gobie lived. Only traces of cocaine were discovered, but they confiscated his X-rated snapshots and determined that the girl was only 15, Gobie says.
“She could have fooled me,” he claims. “She looked and acted a lot older. I thought she was at least 18.”
That year, court records show, he was convicted in Alexandria, Virginia, of three felonies: cocaine possession, oral sodomy, and producing obscene material involving a juvenile.
Gobie says he wound up in jail for 90 days on the felony charges after refusing to help bust his friends, the drug dealers. Later, out on probation, he says those convictions haunted him when he lost job after job as employers recoiled from his rap sheet. At the same time, Washington’s underground world of prostitution beckoned, whispering money, offering anonymity, promising a way out.
“I was forced into the underworld by my record and my probation,” he says. “I felt like the only thing for me to do was open my own escort service, so that’s what I did.”
Curiously, sometimes he ran into a menacing brand of kink he not only disavowed, but says he reported: kiddie porn. Alexandria police say Gabie actually went undercover to help them make a case against a suspected pedophile last year, an investigation that was sparked when Gobie alerted police of a client who allegedly expressed such a preference. But the case was weak — and ultimately it was dropped.
“It wasn’t his [Gobie’s) fault,” says one officer who worked the bust, which was rushed in the wake of Washington sex scandal headlines identifying Gobie.
“He tried to do what he could, but he got nervous after we wired him up. It just didn’t work out.”
By the mid-eighties, when Barney Frank answered his ad in The Washington Blade, Steve Gobie had a staff of ten to 20 women who operated under the name “A Touch of Class.” When Sydney Biddle Barrows’s book, Mayflower Madam, appeared as a TV movie, Gobie and his girls watched it together, delighting in the similarities. Like Barrows, Gobie says he required that his women dress for success in suits that masked black bras, garter belts, and stockings.
Also like Barrows, Gobie says he told his girls that they would never have to perform acts they found distasteful. It struck both Gobie and his girls that he, too, was made for TV, though it would be years before anyone knew his name.
He recalls his girls saying, “She’s just like you. You’re Washington’s “Mayflower Madam.’”
But to the lonely congressman who answered his ad, Gobie became more than just a madam. It was 1985 when he showed up for the first time at Frank’s Capitol Hill basement apartment, in slacks and a jacket, The Washington Post under one arm — a clean-cut preppy all the way.
“Barney said I was the first hustler who ever came over carrying a newspaper,” Gobie told Penthouse, and “then was able to discuss the issues of the day.”
As a congressman, Frank was a darling of the Democrats, an intellectual liberal with brains, passion, and an eloquent rapier tongue just drooling for debate. He always gave good quotes, a sound bite dream, and stood ready to skewer all manner of hypocrites — Democrats and Republicans alike.
“Gobie says he and Frank masturbated into the open locker of then vice-president George Bush in the empty House gymnasium.”
But public successes apparently masked the private pain of a closet homosexual struggling for inner happiness in a public arena. Gobie was hardly the first male prostitute he sought out, Frank has admitted.
In 1985 on their first date, an $80 fling, they talked current affairs and sports. At first Gobie had no idea who this trick was, but he found him nice, bright, a good guy, someone he would soon nickname “Sweet ’n’ Low — sweet guy low on cash.” Here’s how Gobie remembers their affair:
“You want to go on back to the bedroom?” asked Frank.
“Sure,” said Gobie. “Let’s get comfortable.” As Frank started disrobing, Gobie jumped up to help him undress.
“Now you can return the favor,” said the hooker.
“Gladly,” said Frank.
“He took my pants down and I said, ‘By the way, while you’re down there…’ He laughed. He went down on me. I said, ‘I see you have a king-size bed. Lots of room for wrestling…’”
Gobie learned that his client was from Boston, Gobie’s birthplace. “Chelsea Naval Hospital,” said Gobie. They both liked sports. Frank invited him to play on his softball team.
Afterward, accustomed to post-orgasmic customers who felt guilty and wanted him long gone, Gobie was surprised that his client was unusually upbeat.
“I want to see you again,” said Frank. “Regularly.”
Gobie, who genuinely liked him, offered the congressman a discount. “I don’t do this with many clients,” he said, “but you’re such a nice guy, I’m going to cut your fee in half. I don’t want money to be a factor…”
It was the ultimate flattery: a blond hunk offering discount sex to a middleaged homosexual struggling with his self-esteem and still in the closet. According to Gobie, Frank was used to risky street hustlers, one of his few options for company when he was pushing 300 pounds.
“He’d never had a good-looking guy like me want to be with him,” says Gobie. “I think he was really touched.”
Gobie says that now, after dieting down to 200 pounds and working out regularly, Frank was striving to upgrade his low self-esteem to meet the level of his new, hard-fought body image. Frank appeared taken aback by Gobie’s offer of bargain sex.
“You’d do that?” Frank asked.
“I want to meet nice people,” said Gobie. “Money isn’t my main reason. I think you’re a nice guy. I’d like to make it easy for you to see me again.”
Then Frank asked if Gobie had any idea who he was. Gobie said no. Frank brought out a copy of The Washington Blade with his photograph. Gobie read the caption: “Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass.” Gobie shrugged it off.
“I didn’t go, ‘Wow, a congressman.’ I just said, ‘That’s interesting. I look forward to seeing you again.’”
Gobie says he genuinely liked his new client, but as a streetwise hustler, he admits to a mercenary side, aware that such a powerful politician could be worth “far more than money” as a pal.
“You can make important people feel on top of the world by cutting your fees” for sex, he says.
After all, Gobie had a problem with his probation officer — and a past that, as it turned out, Frank wanted to help him rise above. Gobie figured he could make a fortune in the escort game, he says, if he could just find some “official cover” to fool his probation officer. Suddenly here was Frank, the perfect cover. Gobie said there would be no charge for sex anymore.
“I said, ‘We’ll get together and whatever you can do for me, fine,’” says Gobie. “‘I don’t consider this a job. You’re a friend. It would be like charging a friend to be with you.’ So he said, ‘Let me know whenever you need money or anything. We’ll keep it informal.’”
Gobie detected genuine affection on Frank’s part. “He [Frank] said, ‘You’re bright and talented, you could do whatever you want.’ He was hinting that I should get out of the escort business. I told him, ‘I’ve been forced to the fringe by my probation people. I lose every regular job when they [employers] find out about my past. I’m being humiliated.’ He felt sorry for me when he realized I was being hounded and pushed around.”
It was Frank who came up with the idea to hire him as a driver, Gobie says, allowing him to use the car during Frank’s frequent congressional trips out of town. Even more importantly, his “employment” by Frank allowed him to present a pretty face to his probation officer. “He said, ‘You can use me as a reference to the probation people,’” says Gobie, who listed Frank’s house as his address.
Between September 1985 and December 1986, Frank sent four letters on official stationery to Gobie’s probation officer, one of which asked if Gobie could travel with him. But Frank has denied that his aim was to mislead Virginia probation officials.
“He is intelligent, personable, and reliable,” Frank wrote of Gobie in one letter obtained by Penthouse. “It is important for me to know that someone of his ability and dependability is looking after… these important tasks for me.”
Frank says that he paid Gobie about $20,000; Gobie says it was more like $2,500. Wherever the truth lies, Gobie’s job, at least as Frank represented it to the probation officer, included “assistance in dealing with a wide variety of personal needs — cleaning and maintenance of homes and cars; purchases of various sorts; and other household and personal matters which become difficult [for me to tend to] given my complex schedule and my constant traveling between Boston and D.C.”
In another letter Frank called Gobie “imaginative and resourceful.”
“Those letters kept me in operation,” says Gobie. “The letters and Barney’s [congressional] perks were worth far more to me than any fees I could have charged him. I wasn’t a gold digger, but I’m not a dumb escort, either.”
At first, Gobie says, Frank didn’t know about the business he was running from the apartment, but he soon caught on — and played along, says the former prostitute.
Beyond any Henry Higgins-style altruism toward Gobie that Frank has cited as his motive, Gobie says that he made Frank feel good about himself, too. “I was doing a lot of good things for Barney besides sex,” says Gobie. “I built him up. He wasn’t as nice before he met me. He was mean and arrogant. He got liposuction after we met. He felt better and looked better.”
“I’d like to think I was partly responsible for building up his confidence, that our relationship gave him the strength to finally come out of the closet,” which Frank did, announcing his sexual preference June 1, 1987.
At the beginning of their relationship, Frank invited Gobie to play softball on his congressional office team. A fledgling congressman from Massachusetts was also invited to play: Joe Kennedy. Frank swooned over his colleague’s athletic prowess and muscled physique.
“He said, ‘He’s a strapping young man, isn’t he?’” says Gobie. “He said, Check out those thighs. He’s got some tree trunks… I wonder what he’s packing.’ He said. ‘I’d do [him] in a minute.’”
“How do you think a little faggot like me moved in the circles I did?” Spence boasted. “It’s because I had contacts at the highest levels of the government.”
They sometimes gossiped about other “boys” on the Hill, says Gobie, as their relationship grew into a friendship. He says he shored up Frank’s sagging ego even as Frank honed his new image and struggled with coming out of the closet.
Gobie recalls Frank weeping when his former colleague, ex-congressman Bob Bauman, suggested Frank’s proclivities in a 1986 tell-all book. “Witty Barney Frank appears at Washington’s annual Gay Pride Day in a tank top with his usual young companion and their picture appears in The Blade without comment,” Bauman wrote. “Most gay [House] members choose to be more closeted, but their names are known to many in and out of gay circles, including the media, which has its own gay contingent.”
“Barney said he didn’t know why Bauman would do that,” Gobie recalls. “We were sitting on his bed. It was in the afternoon. He was searching for a little sympathy and support. I put my arm around him, and he put his head on my shoulder. I said, ‘Don’t let [him] do this to you — shake it off.’ I said, ‘Let’s get down and dirty and have some fun.’”
Frank snapped back long enough to engage in what Gobie likes to refer to as a “scene,” their sexual routine. Despite fun times, “He stayed down about [Bauman] for two or three weeks,” says Gobie.
But Frank was hardly the only closet gay Bauman drew a bead on. “Often it is not so secret.” he wrote. “One of them took the political precaution of acquiring an attractive young wife after the rumor started that he was gay. He can still be found some evenings in Washington gay bars smirking with his companions at the nude male dancers.
“Another,” he wrote, “is more cautious: He sends out one of his staff aides to recruit male hustlers for a price, thus avoiding being seen in public places that might raise questions…”
’All-male parties are often graced by some of the big names of our times… [and] include Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives, labor-union officials, and business leaders. Sometimes they bring their younger male friends with them [derisively known as “twinkies”] and sometimes… lovers of many years. Some are close friends of the President [Reagan] some serve on the staff of the national political committees of both parties, and some aspire to higher office…”
At the same time, Frank pulled no punches when he gossiped with Gobie about colleagues. They worked out often in the sacrosanct House gymnasium, where sources say members snore off hangovers in sleeping cubicles after a heavy party schedule. There, Gobie said to Frank, “Hey, man, you get to check out all the guys who come in [here] naked. Who’s got the biggest dick on the Hill?” And Frank named a conservative western senator.
Talk turned to another senator. “Barney respected him,” recalls Gobie. “He said he was the smartest person he’d ever met on the Hill, but drinking led him to pick up male prostitutes on the street, guys who could mug him.”
“I asked Barney, ‘Have you ever done it with another congressman?’ And he said, ‘Certainly not. They don’t want each other, someone who looks like them. They want someone who looks like Tom Cruise.’”
Which gave Gobie an idea for his outcall ads: “Top Gun with large barrel, likes to shoot.”
By then Frank had begun to fancy himself a gay Henry Higgins. The only problem was that his Eliza Doolittle was a male pimp.
While Frank has maintained that he was grooming his consort. Gobie argues that it was his kind attention to Frank that was therapeutic and further allowed the congressman to emerge from the lonely shell where he’d spent most of his life as a closet gay. Not that Gobie was blind to the perks that his friendship with Frank delivered.
At the love nest, he often regaled Frank with sordid tales. Frank was especially aroused by reports involving “violence and rough stuff,” he says.
During their 18-month relationship, by Gobie’s count, he and Frank had sex 30 to 40 times in all, “about every two weeks, or we’d just meet for dinner.”
Early in their friendship, however, Frank grew bored with their scenes, but Gobie says that he declined to escalate into the realm of anal sex. So Gobie began booking hard core male prostitutes for his mentor. “I said, ‘Look, I know you want to do other things, and I appreciate your being understanding with me. But I’d like to help you get your yayas out, expand your horizons. I can get you some nice guys at a reduced rate.’ And he said, ‘I’d love to do that.’”
There were about six in all, says Gobie. Frank preferred 19-yearolds, especially one trim, six-foot blond named “Ricky” who rode to his place on a ten-speed bike. Frank chatted him up about bikes. “Ricky told me Barney said he wanted a bike for exercise, and so he could cruise for boys,” says Gobie. A nervous Ricky, the prostitute who confirmed Gobie’s recollections, spoke for the first time to Penthouse. He serviced Frank once, he said, for a discounted $100 charge after Gobie arranged the tryst and agreed to waive a referral fee as a favor to Frank.
“I can honestly say he [Frank] wasn’t gentle,” said Ricky, who begged anonymity. “He wrestled me around and pushed me and shoved me a lot…”
“When he fucked me, he was very rough about it. I said something about safe sex, but he didn’t use a rubber.”
Later, says Gobie, “Barney told me, ‘Ricky was really nice, but he had nothing between the ears. He was an airhead.’ But he said they had a hot time. He said, ‘I fucked him in the ass.’ He felt really good about it.”
Sometimes Frank, the respected congressman, daydreamed about living a secret life as a paid escort. “He said, ‘If I’d been 20 years younger, I would have liked to have tried hustling… I think it would be a thrill to get paid for sex.’”
“You’re good-looking, you’re in shape,” said Gobie, hustling flattery to the brink of falsehood. “You could do it.”
Once Frank asked Gobie to include him in a sex-for-hire scene, “if you can ever set up a three-way,” says Gobie. “He said, ‘just make sure no one knows I’m a congressman… I don’t care about the money.’ I said, ‘Sure, as soon as I can set it up, I’ll let you know.’”
Gobie says he admired Frank outside the bedroom, especially for a penchant to help the underdog. “One day at a restaurant, Barney stood up to a bunch of Marines razzing a table of gays,” he says. “They were sashaying around with limp wrists and laughing. So Barney says, ‘My name’s Congressman Barney Frank. Do you guys have a problem? Were you harassing these men because they are gay?’ He got their commanding officer’s name and reported them.”
By August 1987, Frank’s landlord reported the basement brothel to his tenant, after one of Gobie’s prospective prostitutes mistakenly approached the landlord. Gobie had had a good run by his count: from one to three tricks a day, five days a week over 18 months, during the hours of nine to five.
“I had at least two orgasms in Barney’s bed,” laughs a former Gobie hooker named Lyn, who calls Frank’s claims that he didn’t know about the operation “baloney.”
“Barney knew when a woman had been in his bed,” laughs Gobie. “He’d sniff the sheets and say, ‘Smells like fish to me.’”
And so it came to pass: the show down.
“Barney was hot,” says Gobie. “He said, ‘The landlord found out what’s going on. One of your girls asked if this was the place to come for escort inter views… Do you realize what could happen if The Washington Post got hold of this?’ All I could say was, ‘Oh my God.’ He said, ‘You realize it’s gotta stop, don’t you?’” Frank has said that he ordered Gobie to move out on the spot, but Gobie says he was far more understanding than that. Frank offered to help him relocate. “I told him I needed $2,000 or $3,000 to move to Florida,” Gobie says. “I thought Washington had tapped out for me. Barney offered me $10,000 to $12,000, but I said, ‘I don’t need that much.’”
While Frank maintains that he had little contact with Gobie after he dismissed him that August, Gobie says they stayed in close touch and that the congressman allowed him to use his Chevrolet Chevette anytime he wanted.
“I always told Frank when I was using it,” says Gobie. “I used it all the time.” He said it was okay… He said it was okay to use it the entire Christmas break.” When Frank went home to Boston for the holidays in 1987, Gobie used the car to buy drugs, an episode that ended with the congressman’s rear window smashed by an outraged dealer. Gobie says Frank authorized the insurance company to take care of the damage.
Frank refused to allow reporters with The Boston Globe access to his insurance records, but the newspaper reported that his insurance company wrote a check for $164.65 to Miles Glass Company.
The final blowup between the two, according to Gobie, came just before New Year ‘s Day, 1988, when Frank asked him to pick up a suit at the cleaners that he needed for an out-of-town speech. Gobie says he accidentally picked up the wrong clothes. Frank didn’t discover the mistake until he got off the plane. “He was furious,” says Gobie. “He phoned me and said, ‘You goddamned motherfucking bastard.’ He accused me of using his clothes to blackmail him. I think he was using it as an excuse just to blow me off.
“I said, ‘Look, if this is the way you want to act, fine. It wasn’t intentional, but if you want to make it sound like it was, that’s your problem.’”
By then Gobie was off probation. “He didn’t need me anymore,” reflects-Gobie. “I didn’t want him to need me. I didn’t have time to play concubine to a congressman.”
Gobie also felt that the relationship was getting too emotional: Once “Barney expressed his love for me, but it wasn’t a sappy thing. He said, ‘You know how I feel about you. I love you.’ But we always said we’ll never be in love, that friendship was the most important thing to maintain. But he still told me, ‘I have feelings of love.’”
Gobie tried to give Frank an easy out, he says. “I’d say, ‘Barney, you can’t feel this way about me, I’m just a hooker, a businessman.’ But he’d say, ‘No, don’t say that. You’re more than that.’ I was trying to protect him from himself.”
“He was hung up on me, but I couldn’t reciprocate emotionally. So I pushed him to have a more active social life. I said, ‘Barney, just go out and chase some guys around. You’ve got what it takes. Everyone likes you.’”
Then it was over and stories began to break about Washington escorts. Gobie feared that he was about to be exposed, so he picked up the phone and called a reporter with The Washington Times. “I said, ‘I’ve been reading your stories,’” recalls Gobie. “‘You’ve got the tip of the iceberg. I’m the ice-berg you’re looking for.”
At the same time that he was seeing Frank, Gobie was taking other calls, including some from Craig Spence. The trim homosexual right-winger with a military haircut and a retinue of muscled, blond young men tried to recruit Gobie as his top “chief of procurement” for a sordid scheme to blackmail the powerful politicians invited to his lavish parties, says Gobie. Spence aimed to target his quarries’ favorite sexual kinks with out-call prostitutes, male and female, says Gobie, and then use his knowledge against them.
“He [Spence] said, ‘Do you know the kind of power you can have over people if you’ve got something on them?’” recalls Gobie.
Summoned to Spence’s mansion for the first time in early 1988, Gobie rang the doorbell ten minutes late. He recalls this incident:
“How dare you keep me waiting!” shouted Spence. “I’m a goddamned millionaire!”
Gobie apologized but refused to grovel. He even threatened to leave. Spence backed off and led him into the living room. There Gobie spied some cocaine on a plate. Using a rolled-up $50 bill, Spence began snorting lines, “too many to count,” says Gobie.
Then Spence asked, “Do you think it’s morally correct for one government to sanction the assassination of another head of state?” Gobie says he played along as Spence dropped powerful names.
“I said, ‘Yeah, there are cases where it’s morally acceptable.’ I was trying to keep a straight face. I was playing ‘I’m a contra, too.’”
Upstairs in his bedroom, Spence strapped on inversion boots and then, half-naked, hung upside down and began “doing sit-ups, all coked up.” Gobie figured that he wanted to impress the young hooker with the physical shape he was in at 49. “I was worried he might have a heart attack,” Gobie adds, “that I’d have to dial 911 and get the hell out.”
Then it was on to the bed, where Spence asked, “What are your favorite fantasies?”
“He was like a lot of high-powered people in Washington who are power trippers by day and want to be beaten at night because they feel unworthy of their status, guilty about the people they walk over during the day,” Gobie reflects.
Gobie picked up the cue. “You cocksucker!” he sneered, standing over Spence, who lay naked on the bed by now. “You wimp! Get on your knees!” Gobie dropped his Jockey shorts and held himself. “I bet you want this. I bet you want this real bad, don’t you? So take it.”
“No, it’s not right,” whimpered Spence.
“Take it,” demanded Gobie, as Spence followed orders and performed oral sex.
“He went down on me,” says Gobie, “but neither of us could perform. We’d done too much cocaine. Coke can make the most aggressive guys passive as hell.” Their scene “fizzled real quick,” says Gobie, who was paid $300 for a $100 gig.
Two days later Spence phoned again. “I want to see you,” said the lobbyist, detailing that he wanted Gobie on his “team” to procure prostitutes for clients and powercrats he was trying to influence. “He was aware I’d run out-call services,” says Gobie, who went to see Spence again. “He said, ‘I’ve got a project I’d like you to work on with me. I’d like to make you part of my life.’” Then he told Gobie to “look out that window” at the cars parked in the driveway.
“I’ll buy you a fucking Porsche,” said Spence.
“Yeah? So what do you need me to do?” asked Gobie. He’d heard such talk before.
“I’ve got a list of associates in the United States and around the world,” said Spence, “and I need boys and girls for people in government and high-level businessmen, for my parties, for individuals, for whatever comes up.”
“Sounds dangerous,” said Gobie. “I don’t know.”
“Think about it,” said Spence.
Three days later he phoned again. Gobie dropped by. “You make a decision?” asked Spence.
“I don’t know if I’m capable of doing what you want me to do,” said Gobie.
Spence was bragging as he snorted cocaine, this time with a $100 bill: “I can call President Reagan right now and he’ll take my call.” Then he rambled on about bumping off heads of state. Gobie excused himself, concluding that Spence was “the most dangerous man I’d ever met. If he hadn’t turned into such a crackhead, he could have blackmailed half this town. He used to say, ‘Hey, foreign intelligence agencies are doing it.’”
Among the most damaging chapters of Capitol Hill sex and spying occurred between.1973 and 1977, when a Czech couple named Karl and Hana Koecher wormed into the C.I.A., as well as into the beds of some of Washington’s powerful military and political luminaries. They were classic “sleeper agents,” sent here in 1965 to establish covers as faceless refugees from the Eastern bloc.
It was Karl Koecher’s knowledge of Eastern Europe that eventually landed the tall, lanky man of dour demeanor a sensitive job as a C.I.A. analyst. His wife Hana, on the other hand, was a sexy, petite blonde whose shapely good looks served the Koechers well in their afterhours hobby: attending swingers clubs frequented by members of Washington’s military, political, and journalistic establishments.
Twice a week between the fall of 1974 and the summer of 1976, about 50 upper-middle-class professional men and women met in a rented suburban Washington house to trade partners for sex. Two sources who ran the club, called the Virginia In-Place, say the members included a prominent U.S. senator, an assistant secretary of commerce, reporters from major newspapers, and military and C.I.A. personnel. The club’s organizer remembers Hana Koecher as “strikingly beautiful — warm, sweet, ingratiating, incredibly orgasmic. I went to bed with her several times.”
Those long-running frolics ended when the owners of the swingers’ rented house returned to Washington from Mexico and learned of the orgies in their home. They filed suit against the man who had handled the rental — a real estate agent who had served as an organizer of the swingers club.
While the merrymakers cavorted — the speciality of the house was a chain of naked couples locked in sex standing up, a sort of group-sex “bunny hop,” as one participant remembers it — curious Fairfax, Virginia, neighbors phoned the police.
For several evenings officers watched the house, jotting down visitors’ licenseplate numbers. Using police reports, the home’s owners included in their lawsuit the names of some of the sex-club’s members, including one C.I.A. official and others whose Washington jobs required top-security clearances.
The suit languished unnoticed for two and a half years, until the summer of 1979, when the lawyer for the owners decided to subpoena party-goers. Within two weeks the suit was settled quietly out of court. Three years later, perhaps tipped off by an Eastern bloc defector, the F.B.I. became fascinated with Karl and Hana Koecher, and bureau counter-intelligence agents began quizzing local police about a beautiful Czech woman who, they said, was a star of group-sex parties.
The investigation — which eventually nailed the Koechers as spies — was so sensitive that, according to a Washington police officer contacted by the F.B.I., area police were told to disguise their files on the subject so that no record would appear of the F.B.I. inquiry.
“Theirs was very high-level trolling,” says David Whipple, a retired C.I.A. agent. “If the agency had heard they [the Koechers] were swinging, they would have been kicked out.”
But before the C.I.A. learned of the couple’s betrayals, Karl Koecher had reportedly fingered a high-ranking Soviet official in Moscow as a spy for the United States. That mole committed suicide hours after being confronted by K.G.B. agents. And the United States eventually traded the Koechers for Anatoly Scharansky in a 1986 swap.
It’s after midnight when Gobie steers the tour to another hot spot for some powerful gay Washingtonians: The Eagle, a leather bar pulsing with macho homosexual Marine Corps-wannabees. There are two floors packed with muscled men in black leather jackets. Up another flight sits a display case hawking “poppers,” leather gear for sadomasochistic sex, and T-shirts with slogans: “Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Whips and Chains Excite Me” and “Dial 911 and Make a Cop Come.” Visitors browse beneath a framed sketch depicting a man in chains, his loins violently ripped by a giant fist as his male assailant masturbates.
“Until a few years ago, there was a room in different clubs around town here where this actually happened, where a guy like this would get gang-banged by a dozen men” says Gobie. ’”And this was after AIDS awareness had begun, but people didn’t seem to care. Lots of gays were into self-destruction, or just didn’t get the word. And when you are doing lots of drugs, it takes away your inhibitions and worries.”
The furtive sex and raunch hereabouts is X-rated and palpable. Cops are curiously absent. “They just don’t like going into these places,” says one male hustler as the entourage proceeds to a gay bathhouse with “glory holes” for anonymous sex in changing booths. Upstairs there is a theater showing hardcore gay porno movies, and a dark maze that is said to be a virtual Grope-o-rama for those so inclined to risk exploring an outlaw brand of lust in the shadow of an AIDS epidemic.
“Frank began to fancy himself a gay Henry Higgins. The only problem was that his Eliza Doolittle was a male pimp.”
A few blocks away, the White House and the illuminated dome of the Capitol glow brightly against a dark autumn sky. “You’d be amazed how many politicians are involved in this world,” says one of tonight’s tour guides, a young up-and-coming male pimp who once worked for the out-call service that was busted last February by the Secret Service.
Suddenly a black Chevy Blazer slows down in the early morning darkness. A window rolls down. A man leans out.
“Hey, aren’t you Steve Gobie?” he shouts.
“No way,” Gobie lies, shrinking into the shadows.
“No, hey, I saw you on TV! You are Steve Gobie.”
The homosexual cruiser throws his fist into the air, thumbs up. He’s shouting now. “Way to go, man! Way to go!”
But if Gobie has achieved cult-hero status for some by blowing the lid off the hypocritical side of gay Washington, he’s earned the ire of others for focusing so much attention into the dark corners where many would prefer no one stared.
The tour ends at Rascal’s, a smoke-filled bar for preppy homosexuals off Dupont Circle, where videos depicting men engaged in anal sex compete with live male dancers. Gobie scans the upstairs bar and, through the haze, spies a former client.
He’s blond, gay, and 26, a gentle, if beefy, 200-pound bartender off from his job in the suburbs. He remembers Gobie from the ad he answered in late 1985. Gobie wanders off as the client we’ll call “Les” plops down with a Scotch.
“He was a really nice guy, even though it was only business, positive and upbeat,” says Les. “He’d talk a while to break the tension, get to know you so you wouldn’t be nervous.”
But Les wound up sexually unhappy. “He told me up front, he made it clear to me he was into women more than men and he wouldn’t do certain things [gay sex acts].” he says. “I was a little disappointed. I wasn’t looking for someone who was straddling the fence.” He sighs. “But I respected his feelings, and we came up with something that would make me happy. Cost me $100.”
They wound up together twice, he says. Then Gobie was hired by his roommate, a woman. “She only paid once,” says Gobie, rejoining the group. He then states that he wound up taking her to bed some 30 times for pleasure after that.
Les remembers one night his female housemate phoned Gobie for action. “He took her to bed — then he comes downstairs and fucks [another girl] who was staying over on the couch. She said it was the best fuck she ever had.” Maybe Les was jealous.
Basking in the rave reviews, Gobie says, “I asked her [the visitor], ‘Can I give you a goodnight kiss?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ Then I asked her, ‘In the place of my choice?’”
“I saw Barney Frank on TV,” says Les, “and I believe he was just lonely like a lot of us guys. So he calls Steve for company like I did. Of course, it’s stupid if you’re in the public eye, and I question Steve’s motives for going public. He’s an opportunist, but we all are in some ways.”
Outside Gobie reaches into the trunk of a car and retrieves a copy of his police rap sheet for assorted offenses. “It’s not a mile long,” he says. “Just sex and drugs. You won’t find any violence or maliciousness in. here, just a person who likes to have too much fun — and got caught.”
