Haider's homosexuality seems to demonstrate the banal truth that anyone can be gay, even unsavoury right-wing types. What it doesn't fit is the model of the deeply closeted gay man so at war with his desires that he crusades against gays in public-- like notorious McCarthy-era prosecutor Roy Cohn, or the anti-gay evangelist Ted Haggard, who, after a scandal involving a male prostitute, said: "There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life."Judging by Petzer's grief and statements last week, he and Haider had carried on an intense relationship. Haider didn't seem to be fighting his nature all that hard. On gay rights, Haider's party has been more liberal than Austria's mainstream conservatives.
 
Stranger, however, was the way the incident was treated in the Austrian press and public. On the one hand, Haider's stop at the gay bar on the night of his death got wide coverage, as did paparazzi photos showing him in the company of young men in the past. "I doubt it would be treated as such a notorious scandal if he had spent his last night getting drunk with a woman," says Robert Kastl, the Austrian director of Publicom, a PR agency focused on gay-community marketing. On the other hand, says Kastl, the Austrian media all but ignored the fact that Haider left behind a grieving widower, just as they had ignored attempts to out Haider as gay in the past. One daily meekly mentioned Haider's "homophile tendencies." Faced with a grieving widow, would the same paper downplay and degrade the dead man's relationship as "heterophile tendencies"? Haider and Petzner were a couple. Period.

Haider's supporters denounced the reports as attemps to "defame" their hero's legacy. Others defended Haider's "right to privacy." All this smacks of double standards and more than a little hypocrisy. Few people speak of the need to keep the existence of politicians' heterosexual relationships or marriages protected by privacy, nor are they generally considered defamatory. No wonder Austria is one of the last countries in Western Europe where no leading politician dares to be openly gay.
 
What the Vienna-based gay-rights organization Homosexual Initiative said after the German daily Tageszeitung first outed Haider in 2000 seems as appropriate today as it was then: "There are many reasons to fight Haider and his politics. Homosexuality is not one of them."