Decades Ago, Marco Rubio & I Had The Same Job-- He Got Arrested For It But I Didn't

Republicans Are Obsessed With Homosexuality

New York Magazine chose a photo of Marco Rubio for the top of Jonathan Chait’s column, Once Hysterical On Gay Marriage, Conservatives Are Now Incoherent. But there is no mention of the not-so-deeply buried fact that a once desperate young Marco Rubio was once a gay prostitute. Now Rubio is the most homophobic member of the Senate. I would have chosen a different photo. I bet you can tell which one they picked and which one I picked.

Former Illinois Republican Aaron Schock hasn't announced if he's reached a final agreement with TitanMen for his proposed gay porn career. I bet the million dollars they're offering him is a lot more than sweaty little Marco was ever offered by the down-market Miami Cuban gay porn operators he got involved with when he was a teenager. Rubio has been the most obsessively homophobic of all the anti-gay Republicans in Congress— careful to never let Ted Cruz get to the right of him on homophobia— and has obviously been over-compensating to hide his own shady past as a gay-for-pay hooker. Rubio, who had been running cocaine for his entrepreneurial brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, when he was just 16, was not quite 19 when he was arrested in Miami's notorious Coconut Grove gay pick-up spot, Alice C. Wainwright Park in 1990. He had flunked out of Tarkio College in Missouri and was back in Miami and in desperate need of money. With brother-in-law Cicilia arrested 3 years previously and then in prison, the family cocaine business was over and Rubio was selling his ass to older gay men, although, for some reason, he never wrote about that episode of his life in his autobiography, An American Son. In it he claims when he was arrested in the closed and locked park he was only drinking beer, not looking for a john for some quick cash.

One of the guys arrested with Rubio, Angel Barrios, laughably claimed they were "trying to get pretty girls," although Coconut Grove was well-known as the totally wrong neighborhood for that. Early in 2016, Miami's New Times interviewed Barrios in regard to Rubio's old life as a gay prostitute. (There are no current allegations that Rubio is still having sex with men, but he is notorious for selling himself to rich older males-- like Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Norman Braman, Jose "Pepe" Fanjul, Paul Singer, Joe Ricketts, Charles Schwab, Ron Weiser, and the Koch brothers-- for his political career.)

Decades after his and Rubio’s arrest, Barrios was associated with perhaps the most notorious gay porn ring in Miami history, an Edgewater house full of models with names like “Khali Kreme” and “Sincere Luv” who had sex all day in front of dozens of webcams. Couple that with the fact that the park where Rubio was arrested was a well-known gay cruising spot and lurid rumors-- with no basis in documented fact-- have blown up all through early 2016 on the internet, eagerly stoked by Trump supporters casting Rubio as a closeted homosexual. Right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones devoted a five-minute segment to the allegations yesterday, while posts on the claims have been heavily upvoted on a Reddit page for Trump supporters.

“I have nothing against gay people, but this is just so far from the truth,” says Barrios, who laughs out loud at the idea of having had a sexual relationship with Rubio. “I have kids, and now they’re reading all this garbage online. It’s insane.”

Yet the story does add to a trend for Rubio, who has dealt with multiple news cycles about shady connections and sketchy choices back in his hometown, from a pile of traffic citations to mountains of questionable credit card debt to a brother-in-law convicted of dealing cocaine. Now Rubio can add to the mix a childhood buddy wrapped up in a years-long legal war over gay porn.

...On May 23, 1990, Rubio and Barrios were with another friend, 18-year-old Derek Preston Wilson, after dark at Alice C. Wainwright Park, a leafy Brickell public space then infamous as a late-night trouble spot. (“People went out there to smoke illegal substances, have sex, drink,” a police spokesman told the Post in its story published last Friday.) At 9:37 p.m., the three teens were booked.

A report obtained by New Times casts little light on why they were arrested, though; an officer notes only that they were “located in main... park after hours.” (The cop does note that Rubio was “calm” and “clean shaven” and that his teeth were “very white.”) Rubio’s spokesperson suggested to the Post that the teens were drinking beer in the park. (The senator’s office didn’t respond to New Times' emails seeking comment for this story.)

...[T]wo years after his childhood friend was sworn in as speaker of the Florida House-- accepting a ceremonial sword from his then-mentor Jeb Bush as cameras clicked away-- Barrios had his own brush with media infamy.

It was May 9, 2007, when an NBC 6 investigative TV crew swarmed a sedate, two-story brick house that Barrios’ father owned on NE 27th Street just east of Biscayne Boulevard. In a special report ominously titled The House Next Door, reporters breathlessly revealed that a website called CocoDorm.com had set up dozens of webcams inside the home.

Scores of ripped, young Hispanic and black male models had been hired at a $1,200 monthly fee, plus free room and board, to live inside, where the cameras caught their every move-- including regularly scheduled orgies. (An ad on the site revealed CocoDorm's recruiting tactics, offering to fly in young models for “30 days of nonstop fucking, sucking, licking, and more with other hot Black and Latin boys.”)

Yesterday, Chait wrote that “in 2004, the Republican Party was united in anger at the idea that judges would seize the issue of gay marriage from its rightful place in the legislative arena. ‘We will not stand for judges who undermine democracy by legislating from the bench and try to remake America by court order,’ insisted President George W. Bush. The Republican Party platform that year declared, ‘We urge Congress to use its Article III power to enact this into law.’ National Review denounced ‘this campaign by legal activists and their judicial accomplices.’ ‘The only question is whether the constitutional status of marriage will be determined by unelected judges or the American people,’ claimed the Alliance for Marriage. Conservatives may finally get their wish. The matter of gay marriage is finally coming for a vote before what they have always insisted is its rightful venue: Congress. And yet, far from expressing gratitude that Congress is finally exerting its sacred Article III powers, conservatives are angry that elected officials are now meddling in business properly settled by the courts.”

“A bill to legislate congressionally recognized gay marriage is a solution in search of a problem,” complained Representative Chip Roy. “This bill is simply the latest installment of the Democrats’ campaign to delegitimize and attempt to intimidate the United States Supreme Court,” thundered Representative Jim Jordan.

The old danger of activist judges has passed, and now conservative principle requires the party to take a stand against activist… legislators.

Congress is voting to codify same-sex marriage because the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade undercut the main legal theory that supported other unenumerated rights, including marriage equality. It’s true that most of the justices who voted for Dobbs said they had no plans to go after gay marriage next. But Clarence Thomas said the opposite, accurately pointing out that the logic of Dobbs straightforwardly supported this course of action. The Republican line now assumes that Thomas is a harmless kook and Congress not only needn’t but shouldn’t take him seriously.

It wasn’t long ago that opposition to gay marriage held pride of place atop the ideals of the right-wing firmament, second only to the strategic genius of the Bush administration’s “global war on terror” strategy. Conservatives thundered daily against the horrific terrors that would ensue if gay people were permitted to wed each other.

“The present danger,” warned one editorial in National Review, “is that the courts will push the country in a dangerous direction in which it would not otherwise go.” Hardly a day went by without the conservative intelligentsia painting a harrowing picture of social collapse in the wake of marriage equality. “The destructive consequences,” predicted a typical polemic, “would fall mainly on the young and the vulnerable who would grow up in a society without the bulwark of traditional marriage protecting them against the excesses of their own immature appetites and the rapacious desire of older males ever eager to expand the zone of sexual permissiveness.”

After their heroic stand at the gates of civilization failed, essentially none of the things conservatives warned would happen actually transpired. The cycle of failed prophecy is a familiar one for American conservatism. Every new social or economic reform, from the abolition of child labor to the establishment of Social Security to Obamacare, brings hysterical predictions of collapse that eventually give way to silent acceptance without any stage of reconsidering the failed mental model that produced the erroneous fears in the first place.

At the moment, the case against gay marriage has reached an awkward phase. Marriage equality has enough broad acceptance (around 70 percent support) that the party doesn’t wish to emphasize the issue. But the minority in opposition forms a large enough portion of their base that few Republicans wish to renounce their old stance completely.

Hence the incentive to declare the matter an improper subject for public debate. Unable to take a stand either in favor or against the marriage-equality bill, Republicans are instead directing their arguments orthogonally, against the Democrats for bringing it up at all.

“Those aren’t real issues. I’ve never seen a person come up to me and talk about getting rid of gay marriage,” huffs Marco Rubio, who seems to have slept through the roughly half-dozen years during which his party was obsessed with this objective. “This is what their base is demanding that they do. Their radical base represents probably 2 percent of the country but a significant majority of the people who give them money.”

If Rubio believes Thomas’s legal analysis is so crazy it will never win a majority, he is free to say so. And if he believes marriage equality is correct on the merits and deserves to maintain its status, he is free to say that, also. His inability to articulate either point shows the sorry state of a once-energetic conservative crusade.

As we pointed out yesterday, the vast majority of House Republicans voted no on the bill. Just 47 voted aye, including the two Miami Republicans who represent Rubio's old turf. Now the bill has moved on to the Senate, where closet case Mitch McConnell will never allow it past a filibuster, with the backing of Rubio and Arkansas closet case Tom Cotton. Oh, you didn’t know about Cotton? There have long been widespread rumors in DC that Cotton is another Republican closet case, a gay hypocrite like McConnell, Patrick McHenry and Lindsay Graham, who votes against LGBT equality while sneaking around in dark places looking for quick sexual thrills with other men. Remember Idaho's hysterically anti-gay stalwart Senator "Wide Stance" Larry Craig? Cotton is a lot like him, although no one has caught him with another man in a public toilet yet. Republican-style, he suddenly got married to a GOP hack attorney (female) from Nebraska a few years ago to cover up his sexual preference for males. Cotton has no personality and no ability to connect with other human beings on any basis other than his obsession with right-wing ideology. He's probably clinically insane, like that guy in the shower scene— played by Anthony Perkins (also an obsessive closet case by the way)— who knifed Janet Leigh and who looked at the time exactly like young Tom Cotton.