The Strange Odyssey of Michael Huffington (Claims He's Homosexual but NOT Gay!)

Michael Huffington sits in a living room in Washington, D.C., a town that he despises, and he wants to say something. He looks hopeful, simple, a little nervous. You may remember him. Four years ago, as a freshman Republican congressman from southern California, he took $30 million, maybe more, from his oil fortune and spent it trying to become a United States senator. Many people make fun of him for being a dilettante, for being deluded, for being a puppet. The people paid a lot of attention to his ambitious wife Arianna, and said that she seemed to be in control of Michael's mind, and they made more fun of him because she sometimes showed up to debate his opponents in his place. Where was Michael? these people said. Who is this guy? they said. At the time, Huffington's campaign was the most expensive nonpresidential election in American history. And it was the most bitterly contested and lavishly covered race in the nation. In a year in which the Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress, Huffington lost. Just barely, but he lost. And he hasn't been heard from since.

And that's rare. Never before in American political history has someone invested so much and expected so little. He has sought to collect no electoral dividend. He has not capitalized on the 100 percent name identification that he bought in the campaign. He will never run for office again. Actually, there's a very good reason why Huffington lost, why the press sensed that he was a cipher, why the voters didn't quite trust him, why even his closest campaign aides felt they didn't know him, why he himself wished his own candidacy would go up in flames. Despite all his money, his army of campaign consultants, his glitzy TV spots, and his even glitzier wife, Huffington couldn't quite hide the fact that he was a very troubled man. And that is what Huffington is here in Washington to talk about. It's all he's really thought about for the past four years.

And this thing that he now wants to say he wants you to know that the act of saying it is the most important thing that he has ever done in his life. He wants you to know that all the other things you may know him for getting a Harvard M.B.A., running his dad's oil-and-gas business, being a multimillionaire, marrying Arianna Stassinopoulos, serving in Congress, running for the Senate pale in comparison with the thing he's doing right now in this quiet room in Georgetown.

First, he wants to say that he's glad he lost. That's right -- glad that he spent perhaps a third of his net worth for nothing. Glad that he and his wife, the irrepressible Arianna, whom he divorced last year, are not cutting a glamorous swath through the nation's capital, eliciting the inevitable comparisons to Jack and Jackie. Glad that he is not, in the fourth year of his six-year term, where he most assuredly would be: at the top of every political pundit's list of Republican vice-presidential nominees for the year 2000. Because, had he not lost it all, Michael Huffington would not be saying what he's about to say. That is, he wouldn't be speaking publicly about what, after a lifetime of confusion and frustration and guilt and pain and repression and denial, he has finally been able to accept about himself at the age of fifty-one: his homosexuality.

When you deny something so fundamental about yourself, put it in storage, thinking it will be there forever, it sometimes slips out unexpectedly, in funny ways. It can make you act strangely. Maybe it makes you sleepwalk through life a little. When you are living someone else's life, is it possible to accidentally spend $30 million on a campaign you don't want to win?

How does a story like this begin? How does the path a man should have taken so diverge from the one he actually takes that he ends up spending half of his life recovering his footing?

Mike Huffington was an ordinary kid with an extraordinary father. Roy Michael Huffington Sr. is part of the generation of men who saved the world in World War II and divided it among themselves later. He became one of the great Texas oilmen of the twentieth century. A ringer for John Wayne, a hard drinker, a loud man, a large man, Roy worked all the time, made millions, and barely knew his wife and his children.

Mike didn't grow up rich. In the early 1950s, when he was little, Roy moved his young family from shabby apartment to shabby apartment all across New Mexico and Texas, chasing oil. He finally settled in Houston, where he took what little money he could scrounge up and rolled the dice punching wells. Time after time, Roy would get a call in the middle of the night, maybe two o'clock in the morning, saying that this or that well had hit nothing and that he had lost everything. Michael was supposed to be asleep, but he'd always eavesdrop, and ever as a boy, he became sensitive to what he perceived as family instability. They didn't have much money, he figured, and what they did have his father would always lose.

Michael Huffington was not yet ten years old, but he was taking the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he was becoming a fearful child. He resolved then, watching his wildcatter namesake, that he would become the opposite of his father. He would spend his life eliminating risk where he saw it, he would not gamble, and he would be stable. He would become a banker, because he figured a bank had lots of money. Banks had flagstone Corinthian columns. Banks were solid.

Mike was an introverted young boy with a gangly build and poor eyesight. For a while, he wore a patch over one eye under thick glasses to strengthen the muscles on the other side. He spent a lot of time watching the small black-and-white television set at home with his chain-smoking mother, Phyllis, a former SMU beauty queen. Roy shipped Mike off to military school in Indiana when he was fourteen, and it seemed to produce the desired effect: By his junior year, he was the second-ranking cadet out of seventy, he had lettered in swimming and crew, and he had become an accomplished marksman. In his senior year, he was promoted to the regimental staff.

As Mike thought about college, Roy and Phyllis, who now had some money in the bank, took him along on a business trip to San Francisco, and they visited nearby Stanford. Mike thought the place was very beautiful, but what really caught his attention was a bunch of students on the ground having a picnic, talking about free love. Morals were changing in America, but, between Roy and military school, where he had been charged with confiscating skin magazines from cadets, Mike was sort of the last one to hear about it. The free-love picnic became the reason he picked Stanford.

But Mike had been raised Republican -- Phyllis would yell at the TV when commentators came on and bashed Nison -- and he soon reverted to form. A button-down conservative in his starched white shirts an dkhaki pants, he was elected co-president of the senior class. During violent protests of the Vietnam War, he found himself locking arms with the Young Americans for freedom to keep the crowd from burning down the administration building. Mike stood for order. He was inspired by Ronald Reagan. He hated the commies. He was drafter but rejected by the Army because he was legally blind. In the summer of 1968, through Stanford's program in Washington, Mike interned in the office of Congressman George Bush, who represented the Huffingtons' neighborhood in Houston. Roy, now prominent in the city's business and political circles, had pulled some strings. The stay in Washington was great -- he lived on his own in leafy Cleveland Park decorated his room with NIXON'S THE ONE stickers, and drank himself to sleep in the sweltering summer heat.

One day, Mike was walking through the Capitol with Bush, when suddenly the young congressman put his arm around Mike's shoulders. Roy and Phillis weren't very affectionate people, and this little hug or attaboy or whatever it was meant everything to Mike. He'd found his mentor. He even began to imagine that, someday, he'd be a senator from Texas.

Mike went off to Harvard Business School, where he had little time for anything but cracking the books. He had dated some women at Stanford, and he had his first sexual experience when he was twenty. But in his last year at Harvard, Mike made time for something else. He developed a friendship with a classmate who had confided to him that he was homosexual. Not that Mike knew what that even was, but for some reason, he wanted more than anything to find out. Mike was already friendly with the guy, liked him, and so he knew he wasn't a loon or anything, and he didn't seem like a pervert.

A year later, while he was living as a bachelor in Chicago, pursuing his surefooted banking career at First Chicago, Mike had sex with a man. The encounter was furtive, sort of an accident. This carrot-topped all-American boy, first-generation offspring of the Marlboro Man, national crew champ at Stanford, politically connected Harvard M.B.A., was sure he was in deep trouble.

He's not really gay, Michael says as he sits in the quiet living room in Georgetown. He's only in this godforsaken town to do this, to tell his story. There's nothing here for him anymore. Arianna loves the place, feeds on it, but, well, as he was saying, he doesn't seem gay to himself. Gay means so much more, carries so much cultural baggage, and he's not that. The word gay just doesn't describe him. It really doesn't.

But he is homosexual. It wasn't a choice; it can't be changed. Lord knows, he tried.

Nothing makes Mike madder than this idea that he was a spoiled, pampered empty suit. That's not right, he says, because Michael Huffington did become a banker, and a good one, and he made his first million without Roy's say-so, and without his money, too. Of course, the Huffington name may have helped a little.

Returning to Houston in 1974, Mike formed a partnership with a friend from Harvard -- backed with a million dollars from an English bank -- and founded the investment bank Simmons & Huffington. Roy Huffington was now a local legend, the owner of several oil wells in Texas and Louisiana, with a net worth of $10 million. Using the Huffington name as a calling card, Mike handled the marketing side of the business, selling financial services to the oil industry.

By now, Mike was in his late twenties, and he soon discovered that his heart wasn't really in banking. Roy had never invited him to join the family business, Huffco, and that was okay, because Mike didn't care for oil, either. He was totally uninterested. The only thing he liked about the oil business was the movie Giant, with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. But by 1976, two top executives at Huffco began to lobby Mike to join their board for the sake of continuity in the business should something happen to old Roy, who was then nearing sixty. Mike resisted until his mother started pushing the idea during their monthly mother-son dinners at a local Mexican restaurant. Phyllis held sway over Mike. And so, without even speaking to Roy, Mike struck a deal to join the company as vice president of supply and distribution, with a salary in the high five figures.

By the late 1970s, Houston was humming. Oil prices had jumped from $3 a barrel to $30. Huffco's Borneo plant was pumping out natural gas like there was no tomorrow. Mike lived in a high-rise apartment three miles from downtown, across the street from a popular disco. He joined the boards of the symphony and the opera, became a member of the Asia Society, and belonged to a local country club, where he took golf lessons. He bought his first piece of art, a Jasper Johns, for $10,000. He had a couple of friends whom he had recruited from out of state to work at Huffco, and he often ate dinner with them and their wives. He became godfather to their children. He took clients to lunch at Michelangelo's, a topless bar, where they would paint the dancers with glowing colors under black lights, and all the women would shine.

He had dated one woman in Chicago and now had a steady Lebanese-born girlfriend in Houston. But something was wrong with his carefully scripted life. Working at Huffco as the son of the founder was hell. He was promoted to chief financial officer, but Mike felt that Roy didn't take him seriously, overruling him on a California project, causing Huffco to lose $40 million. He was also spending a lot of time alone. Only five people in the world had his home telephone number.

Since he had moved back to Houston, Mike had also been having sex with men. He wasn't meeting them at Mary's or the Brazos River Bottom, the hot gay bars in town. He knew no one who was gay, and he was too embarrassed and unsure of himself to venture into that world. So here's what he would do: In straight social settings, a dinner party or at work, he would identify men whom he thought might be interested in having sex with him, and then he'd find some pretext to invite them to dinner, during which he would sit in awkward anticipation, waiting for them to make a move or give a sign. Sometimes the technique worked, but more often it didn't. During these years, he had a handful of one-night stands and one on-again, off-again relationship that lasted for about a year. He thought he might be in love with this man and kept a small picture of him hidden in his apartment. Yet each time he had sex with a man, he became guilt-ridden and depressed. He thought that he was straight, and all this sex with men was confusing to him. He knew no one else like himself. In 1976 and 1977, Mike began to have more sex with men than with women. He was having a horrible time. It occurred to him that he might be gay. He was lonely and scared, mostly that Roy would find out.

One day in 1977, Mike, who was raised a Presbyterian and did not consider himself to be especially religious, picked up a book called The Three Most Important Steps to Your Better Health and Miracle Living, by Oral Roberts. He read the Sinner's Prayer: Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner. Lord, I believe.

In the margin, Huffington scrawled in blue ink: "3:00 P.M., February 26, 1978. As I read this passage, I broke into tears and felt God enter my life. I am so happy and relieved."

Mike now thought he could eliminate his attraction to men through prayer. He felt that God had wiped everything clean.

But the impulse couldn't be shaken. He was still drawn to men. A few years later, he saw a man on Pat Robertson's 700 Club who said he had been gay but had given it up. It was the first time that he had heard of such a thing. The television show made him cry. Again, the Lord had come into his life to clear things up. God had told Mike that he wasn't supposed to be with men.

At age thirty-three, Mike Huffington made a resolution: I am straight. I will get married. I will have children. I will never sleep with another man again.

As Mike sat in black tie in oil tycoon J. Paul Getty's Pacific Heights mansion in San Francisco, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, sipping a cocktail before the opening of the San Francisco Opera, Arianna Stassinopoulos walked into the parlor. It was September 1985, and Ann Getty had invited Mike out to escort her friend for the evening.

He knew little of Arianna's glamorous past. A Greek-born beauty, Stassinopoulos had taken London by storm as the first foreign-born female president of the Cambridge Union debating society. She had written two books, one an antifeminist tract, the other a best-selling biography of opera diva Maria Callas. Although her family had little money, she moved easily through the upper echelons of London and New York society and was now living in Los Angeles, writing a biography of Pablo Picasso. She had dated a number of rich and famous men, including British intellectual Bernard Levin, real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, and former California governor Jerry Brown. Like Roy Huffington, Arianna was a life force all her own.

Mike was introduced to Arianna. The two began talking and then separated themselves from the twenty or so guests, taking seats on a French settee. What's the most important thing in your life? he asked her. Arianna said God. God struck a chord, for Mike was then in the process of becoming an Episcopalian. He wanted the rituals, the choirs, communion, and confession.

The next morning, the couple made the society page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The picture caption read, "Arianna Stassinopoulos looks adoringly at Michael Huffington." For Arianna, the publicity was nothing new, but it was the first time Mike's name had ever been in teh paper. Forbes had once profiled his dad, but Mike avoided being interviewed. When the Forbes 400 listed Huffco, Mike tried to get the company dropped the next year. But this time, he didn't really mind the press. The two spent the weekend together, walking the city hand in hand. At the end of the weekend, Mike was charmed, but not enough to ask how he could reach Arianna again.

About a month passed when Ann Getty called from San Francisco, asking Mike if he would escort her to the opening of John and Patricia Kluge's house in Charlottesville, Virginia. Getty mentioned that Arianna would be flying in for the event from Paris, where she was doing research on Picasso. The three met in New York and flew to Charlottesville on the Huffco plane. At the dinner, Arianna had been paired wth Virginia senator John Warner, but she spent the evening with Mike.

Arianna's previous boyfriend had been Mort Zuckerman, and he liked champagne and caviar. Mike told Arianna he wasn't like More Zuckerman. He liked Coke and pizza. Arianna and Mike spend the next weekend together. Arianna ordered pizza, and Mike began to think something special was going on. Soon after, they got together at the La Costa Resort outside San Diego, as guests of Barbara Walters, who was a close friend of Arianna's. Walters told Michael that a lot of Arianna's friends were wondering who he was and whether he was good enough for her. Mike laughed.

In December, Mike took Arianna to the company Christmas party in Houston, the first time he'd ever shown up with a date. She met his parents. Arianna surely wasn't a Texas girl, but she'd do just find: The Huffingtons, whose younger daughter, Terry, had not yet married, wanted grandchildren. Now was the time for Mike to tell Arianna about his sexual past. He had never breathed a word of it to anyone and had no idea what to expect. He assumed that it might spell the end of the relationship, but Arianna told him it made her love him even more.

At Arianna' home in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve, with her mother and her friend Shirley MacLaine in attendance, Arianna passed a wand around the dinner table as each guest made a wish. Arianna wished that she would be pregnant within the year. When the wand passed to Mike, he wished that Arianna's wish would come true.

They were married three months later at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York. Giving a toast at the reception thrown by the Gettys, Roy Huffington stood up and said, "We had almost given up on Michael."

On his wedding night, as Arianna waited in the next room, Mike found himself standing naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom, staring at the ring on his finger.

"I now know that my sexuality is part of who I am," says Michael Huffington as the afternoon sun comes into the quiet Georgetown living room. "It's not unlike other things in my life. I was not interested in the oil business, not the whole time I worked there. It seems I had to do a lot of things to find out they were not what I wanted to do."

He did not want to be Roy Michael Huffington Jr., Texas oilman, and in marrying Arianna Stassinopoulos, he thought he had found the perfect way out.

The couple honeymooned in .. in .. Michael Huffington can't seem to remember. Irritated, he bolts from his red tartan armchair, leaves the room, and returns with an atlas, furiously flipping the pages, searching the Caribbean.

They went to Angullia, they went to Princess Margaret's estate outside London, they boarded the Orient Express, they arrived in Venice. By the third week of the honeymoon, Arianna was on the telephone, resuming work on the Picasso book that she had shelved for six months to court Mike. He was offended.

Things didn't improve in Washington, where the couple settled. Through his connection to George Bush, Mike had gotten appointed as an arms-control negotiator at the Pentagon. But he was distracted in the job, couldn't focus. He remembers virtually nothing of his year there, except for the time that he tried to get a gay employee a security clearance.

Mike and Arianna had money troubles. Their net worth was tied up in Huffco stock. Arianna, who had hired a staff for their Georgetown home, took to the lecture circuit to make ends meet. When she wasn't doing that, she was holed up working on her book. Mike went to the movies by himself.

In the spring of 1987, six months into Arianna's first pregnancy, as Mike and his mother-in-law prayed nearby, Arianna lay on a hospital table in their living room with her legs elevated above her head and fluid leaking from her embryonic sac, struggling not to lose the baby boy they had named Alexander. After ten days, Mike looked on as a doctor removed the dead fetus from Arianna's womb. After the miscarriage, he went to an Episcopal monastery in New York for three days of prayer with a close friend, the best man at his wedding, as Arianna, her mother, and her sister mourned without him. Mike blamed Arianna's manic work schedule. When he returned home, he told her he was finished with Washington. Finished with Houston. Finished with the oil business. How about moving out to California?

After looking at 120 homes in Los Angeles, where the prices were shockingly hgh to a Texan, the Huffingtons flew to Santa Barbara to see a $4 million, four acre Mediterranean-style estate with rolling green lawns and a view of the Pacific. Even though Mike couldn't afford it, it was a bargain for what he couldn't afford.

In the summer of 1988, the Huffingtons traveled the country as Arianna promoted her Picasso biography. They attended the Republican convention in New Orleans, where Arianna suddenly fainted. She had become pregnant again after they had watched the film Wings of Desire at the River Oaks Theater. To avoid another tragedy, Mike wanted her to live in stress-free, idyllic surroundings. But he had no plan to move to California himself. Mike still worked for Huffco, and, son or no son, Roy Huffington told Mike he wasn't about to employ a senior executive who lived full-time in Santa Barbara. For more than two years after the birth of their daughter Christina, Mike and Arianna lived apart, with Mike joining them sometimes for weekends.

Wanting desperately to get out of Houston, Mike took Huffco's officers to a retreat in Laguna Niguel, California. There, he presented his idea to sell the company. It was, he had convinced himself, the only way out. He didn't want to leave his stock in a company that he had no part in, and there was nobody to buy him out, either. At the meeting, he laid out a history of oil prices from 1973, when oil sold for $3 a barrel, to the peak in the early 1980s of $35 a barrel, back down to $6 in 1986. By 1989, prices were back up to about $20 a barrel. This was the second peak, he told them. Time to sell. In some sort of miracle, everyone was persuaded. Mike then went to his mother, who also consented. But when he approached his father and told him there was complete agreement to sell, Roy barked, "No." Period.

A few months later, after returning from a trip to Europe, Roy asked Mike offhandedly, "How's the sale going?" It was typical of the way Roy related to his son. Mike quickly contacted Goldman Sachs and arranged for the sale. The Huffington family made $500 million. Mike's share came to about $80 million. Oil prices have not been that high since.

In mid-1991, Huffington drove from Houston to Santa Barbara with little idea of how he would spend the rest of his life. By now, Arianna had given birth to a second daughter, Isabella, who was conceived in Houston after the couple watched another film, Jesus of Montreal. Arianna had resumed her career as a writer and was socializing with local celebrities, the Khashoggi brothers, and Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons and his wife. They also got their feet wet in California politics. Governor Pete Wilson, who knew Roy, had asked Mike and Arianna to host a party at their estate for his financial backers. They threw another party for Mr. Virtue, William Bennett. Mike had sold his family's company, and he was worth a lot of money. But six months into his dream life, he was bored stiff.

Poor Michael. Can't seem to find anything. "I've been through a long process of finding out the truth about me," he says from his Georgetown confessional. Now his search would become very public. And he would be at the controls. Nobody put him up to what he was about to do. The blame for the creation of Michael Huffington, politician, was his alone.

For several years, Huffco and the Huffington family had heavily supported Republican politicians throughout the Southwest and California, where the company had operations. Mike had become a member of Team 100, top-dollar donors to the GOP, and also supported Newt Gingrich's political arm GOPAC. In late 1991, Mike heard about a Republican training seminar for people interested in running for office, and since he had nothing else to do, he decided to see what it was all about. Six months after arriving in the state, Mike announced that he would run for Santa Barbara's congressional seat. He hadn't given more than a speech or two in hisentire life; his hands were sweaty, and his voice cracked.

Mike felt he had something to prove. He was running against a popular eighteen year incumbent Republican congressman, Bob Lagomarsino, and when pressure came from party leaders to quit the race, he wouldn't budge. Dan Quayle called and told him bluntly to get out of the race, and Mike replied, "With all due respect, the Republican party is not the Communist party, and I'm staying in." By June, Huffington's candidacy had caught fire. He had become more skilled as a speaker and debater, and he had the backing of the town's newspaper, which wanted Lagomarsino out. In the most expensive House race in American history, Mike spent $5.4 million and stunned the political world by beating Lagomarsino by five points.

Returning to Washington, the Huffingtons bought a $4 million home in Wesley Heights, where Arianna assumed the role of political wife, entertaining lavishly, networking with the Republican leadership, and keeping a hand in the business of the congressional office. Arianna had not had strong feelings about Mike running for office, but once he did, he needed her help. During the campaign, she had overseen the issue books -- against his instincts, he agreed to run as pro-choice on her advice -- and she had even stood in for him in a couple of debates with Lagomarsino.

Soon enough, Mike realized that he wasn't a politician, and he wasn't much of a legislator, either. He found the minutiae of crafting laws boring. He found the desperate, ambitious, nose-to-the-grindstone culture of Washington to be as suffocating as Houston had been. He wanted to withdraw, retreat, escape. He would experience moments of acute consciousness, as if startled from a sleep: Oh, God, I'm a congressman. Now what? When he was supposed to be at a banquet or at an embassy party or hobnobbing with fellow congressmen, Mike would instead go to a movie.

He acted strangely. He began to hug his staff members, sometimes cornering them. One young man quit from all the hugs. On the way back from lunch with his aides, he would insist that they stop on a part bench and enjoy a few minutes of solitude. There is no sense of aesthetics, beauty, or humanity in Congress, he explained to them. Washington is like a black hole for the spirit, he told them, searching their eyes for some sort of comprehension. People thought he was nuts.

In mid-1993, just months into Mike's first term, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, the head of the Republican senatorial campaign committee, whose job it was to recruit candidates and raise money, summoned Mike to his hideaway office in the Capitol. Gramm had been a family friend: Roy Huffington was one of his major political backers. Gramm told Mike that the party wanted him to challenge Dianne Feinstein in the 1994 Senate race. The campaign would be costly -- $10 million to $15 million, Mike figured -- and Gramm promised him at least another $1 million from the party. Mike agreed to think about it.

When he spoke to Arianna, she said she thought the timing was wrong, but Mike wasn't thinking strategically. He would never say this to anyone, but he hated Washington and hated politics so much that he would do anything not to have to run for reelection to his House seat. And he couldn't just retire after taking the job from Lagomarsino, to whom it seemed to mean something.

Yes, he would run for the United States Senate against Dianne Feinstein; And, God willing, he would lose.

So Mike tried to live his father's life. He tried to live Arianna's. Then he tried to live his own, as a politician, and it was the most spectacular failure of all.

He sits in the quiet living room, thinking. Who in God's name tries to work out inner problems by running for Congress? Maybe more than you'd think. But Washington is a terrible place to search for your identity.

Well, he got his wish. He lost. And he was mad. He had wanted out of politics, the race had been his escape, but if it hadn't been so close -- two points! -- it would have been easier to take. He was mad about all the money he had spent. Phil Gramm never came through with that million bucks. He was mad at his high priced consultant, Ed Rollins, whom Arianna had made him hire. But most of all, he was mad at Arianna. Mike thought Arianna was behind the persistent rumors in political and media circles that he was gay. Arianna had always talked too much for her own good, and there was nothing she hadn't told her close friend John-Roger, the guru who believed he was Jesus Christ. Mike never liked John-Roger; he hated competing for his wife's attention with this spooky man who seemed to have a hold on her. Mike was sure the bastard had spread the gay stories.

But most of all, Mike was furious with Arianna over the nanny issue. As the campaign drew to a close, Huffington's internal polling showed him a few points behind but closing fast. And then, news that Mike and Arianna employed a nanny who was an illegal alien made the front pages throughout the country. As soon as the story broke, he dropped six points. Arianna had hired the nanny back in the late 1980s, when she was in Santa Barbara and he was stuck in Houston. When he found out about it, he told Arianna to fire the nanny, but Arianna had refused. Here he was, a man who had never even had his own cleaning woman before he got married, being humiliated over this.

Months after the loss, he still couldn't get it out of his mind. It seemed as if the frustration of his entire life was finding its release in this stupid issue.

The Huffingtons returned to live in Washington, but Mike felt more aimless than ever. In 1995 and 1996, he fell further into an emotional abyss. He didn't work. He kept his California residency -- it seemed like the thing to do if he was ever going to seek office again. That clearly was a ridiculous notion, but he was the only one who knew that. To the world, he was now a deep pockets electoral monster with 100 percent name identification in California. He'd be back. California attorney general Dan Lungren was so concerned about Mike's intentions regarding the governor's race that he and the rest of the state's Republicans essentially promised Mike the lieutenant governorship if he would stay out of Lungren's path. But Mike wanted no part of it. He was out for good.

Arianna, meanwhile, seemed resilient. Because she had spent two years in Washington supporting his career, Mike agreed to double her monthly allowance for two years so she could hire staff to launch a career as a political pundit. Soon enough, she had a syndicated column, a book deal, and a regular presence on the cable chat shows. The Republicans had taken Congress, and Arianna became the hostess of the Gingrich revolution.

Mike spent his time taking the girls to school and picking them up and changing light bulbs in the Wesley Heights mansion. Arianna threw parties. They had had some great parties together; when Mike turned forty, Arianna threw an A-list bash, and Norman Mailer showed up and predicted that Mike would be president. Now, Mike would walk silently among the guests, flicking the lights on and off when he wanted them to go home.

But one thing that interested him about these parties was that sometimes they were opportunities to meet gay men. The fleeting thoughts about sex with men were more persistent now. He resurrected the old technique from his bachelor days in Houston. He would get telephone numbers from some of these men. Find a pretext to invite them to dinner. Just wanted to get to know them, he would say with some trepidation. He wasn't hitting on them, exactly, and he never had sex with them. He would remain faithful to Arianna.

As he had done in his conversations with his gay friend at Harvard twenty-five years before, he was trying to imagine what gay life was like, trying to find himself by knowing these men. He would talk awkwardly about what it takes to unlock your soul. When did you first know you were gay? How did you come out? What was the reaction? Whom do you date? How do you meet? What do you do in bed?

When the two year deal with Arianna expired at the end of 1996, Mike used the occasion to demand that the couple move back to California. There was nothing in Washingotn for him. He knew Arianna wanted to stay, and the standoff quickly degenerated into talk of divorce. About that time, Arianna called Mike's mother, his sister, and his priest and told them that Mike was gay. They all told Mike that they loved him anyway. Unintentionally, Arianna had forced Mike out. The marriage was dissolved in June 1997.

In the year and a half since, Mike has spent his time trying to build another life for himself. He's produced movies, and it's been the most agreeable work he's ever found. He co-sponsored, with actor Rob Reiner, an anti-tobacco initiative on last November's California ballot, a subject about which he seemed truly passionate. But mostly, he's been trying to set his personal life right. He's made gay friends, but usually without telling them about himself. He's taken out some men on what he likes to think are dates, without telling them of his intentions. He's managed to have sex a couple of times.

He did get up the nerve to go to a gay bar for the first time recently. it was in London, with a friend. Mike was nervous. Shortly after they entered the cavernous, multi-tiered dance club, he disappeared. An hour later, when the friend wanted to leave, he looked up in the darkness and saw mike in the middle of the raised dance floor, eyes closed, lost in the music.

Not long ago, Mike had lunch with Arianna, and she told him that he seemed happier than in all the years she has known him. And Mike told his ex- wife that he is beginning to date men again. And Arianna Huffington asked Michael Huffington to be careful.

After reciting flatly, for hours on end, the details of his life of adversity, his voice finally has some inflection. The sun has set on the Potomac, and he's finished here. Michael Huffington wants you to know that he's happy now. Really, really happy. He's become Greek Orthodox. He's selling his film production company. Not really cut out for it. He's not sure if he's a Republican anymore. Maybe he's a Democrat. And he's decided to tell this story. It's the most important thing he's ever done. Of course, he's given no thought to how the world will receive it. None.

He's not really gay, Michael says as he sits in the quiet living room in Georgetown....

.....But he is homosexual.

Huh? Could someone explain that?

Nothing makes Mike madder than this idea that he was a spoiled, pampered empty suit.

Mikey makes a vehement assertion but a few lines later...

Sorry Mikey but it does sound like you are a spoiled, pampered empty suit.

During these years, he had a handful of one-night stands and one on-again, off-again relationship that lasted for about a year. He thought he might be in love with this man and kept a small picture of him hidden in his apartment. Yet each time he had sex with a man, he became guilt-ridden and depressed. He thought that he was straight, and all this sex with men was confusing to him.

And your absurd claim to be straight is confusing as hell to me.

Mike now thought he could eliminate his attraction to men through prayer. He felt that God had wiped everything clean.

Once you go gay (or in Mikey's case, "homosexual" only), you're gay. No amount of prayer will change that. I know some of you out there violently disagree with that statement but read on....

...But one thing that interested him about these parties was that sometimes they were opportunities to meet gay men. The fleeting thoughts about sex with men were more persistent now. He resurrected the old technique from his bachelor days in Houston. He would get telephone numbers from some of these men.

So much for prayer. But the fact is when you're gay, you're gay and it isn't surprising that Huffington relapsed.

At age thirty-three, Mike Huffington made a resolution: I am straight. I will get married. I will have children. I will never sleep with another man again.

Or so he claimed before his relapse posted above.

God struck a chord, for Mike was then in the process of becoming an Episcopalian. He wanted the rituals, the choirs, communion, and confession....

.....He wanted MEN!

SHEESH! Talk about being shallowly PATHETIC! He gets impressed because Arianna tried to impress him by eating pizza?

Now was the time for Mike to tell Arianna about his sexual past. He had never breathed a word of it to anyone and had no idea what to expect. He assumed that it might spell the end of the relationship, but Arianna told him it made her love him even more.

STOP THE MUSIC!!! Didn't Arianna once claim that she didn't know that her ex-hubby was gay while they were married? If so, this exposes her lie.

The couple honeymooned in .. in .. Michael Huffington can't seem to remember.

Must have been an exciting honeymoon....NOT!

Mikey sounds more and more pathetic as we progress into more of his pathetic life.

And Mikey now wants to be governor of California?...Why?

He acted strangely. He began to hug his staff members, sometimes cornering them. One young man quit from all the hugs.

I can definitely see why. A homo (NOT gay) congressman wants to hug you a lot and no wonder you're uncomfortable.

But most of all, he was mad at Arianna.

Mikey seems to have a lot of pent-up anti-Arianna rage.

Mike thought Arianna was behind the persistent rumors in political and media circles that he was gay.

Yeah, Mikey was enraged by this since, as he said, he is homosexual, NOT gay.

Arianna had always talked too much for her own good, and there was nothing she hadn't told her close friend John-Roger, the guru who believed he was Jesus Christ.

Anybody else out there have friends who think they are Jesus Christ? I don't but I was wondering how you hang out with somebody who thinks they are Jesus. Maybe we should ask Arianna.

Mike was sure the bastard had spread the gay stories.

Again Mikey is mad because he is homosexual, NOT gay, dammit!

Mike spent his time taking the girls to school and picking them up and changing light bulbs in the Wesley Heights mansion. Arianna threw parties.

I feel there is a funny light bulb joke in there somewhere: How many Michael Huffingtons does it take to change a light bulb?

Norman Mailer showed up and predicted that Mike would be president.

So what kinds of drugs is Norman Mailer taking recently?

But one thing that interested him about these parties was that sometimes they were opportunities to meet gay men.

Somehow I think this is connected to the Michael Huffington screwing the light bulb joke.

He wasn't hitting on them, exactly, and he never had sex with them. He would remain faithful to Arianna.

Somehow he sounds like an alcoholic that lifts a drink to his lips but does not actually drink it.

Uh, Mikey? Have you ever considered renting a video?

About that time, Arianna called Mike's mother, his sister, and his priest and told them that Mike was gay.

Such a saint Arianna was for outing Mikey without his permission.

Unintentionally, Arianna had forced Mike out.

When you tell the members of your hubby's family that he is gay...that is NOT unintentional.

He's taken out some men on what he likes to think are dates, without telling them of his intentions. He's managed to have sex a couple of times.

More likely a couple of HUNDRED times.

Michael Huffington wants you to know that he's happy now. Really, really happy. He's become Greek Orthodox.

Why? So he can date George Stephanapoulos without Georgie's family raising religious objections?

He's selling his film production company. Not really cut out for it.

It sounds like Mikey isn't really cut out for much of anything.

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