One recent Saturday afternoon, I sat down to discuss the seeming oxymoron "gay Republican" with Dave Bancroft, 32, a party activist and lifelong Boston Irish Catholic who is openly gay and has been a Log Cabin member since 1990.

Bancroft was six when his father ran for city council as a GOP man. "I was a Republican a long time before I knew what my deal was," he told me--and it took me a second or two to realize he was talking about being gay. He leaned across the formica table between us, his pink face looking pinker over his crisp white turtleneck: "But I don't make it an issue. People I work with know, my family, friends. I don't even deal with it anymore. The people I know are accepting."

People he knows in the party?

"Well, not everyone," he said. "Some friends of mine went to the 1992 convention. Bill Weld [the Governor of Massachusetts, who is pro-gay] was booed. I was horrified."


So why doesn't Bancroft just, you know, leave?

He bristled at this one and absently fingered his turkey-on-a-croissant. "The whole country is shifting to the right. The easiest thing to do would be to give up and find something else to do with my Saturday afternoons. But you've got to fight because the Pat Buchanan people will be out there, campaigning for their guy."

It's an argument Log Cabiners think their party might like right now, with all the talk about losing "moderate" voters. Everybody from New York Senator Al D'Amato to California Governor Pete Wilson says the party is straying to the right of its constituents. The Log Cabin people believe they can exert just the moderating influence needed... to regain the presidency, for example.

"No Republican can win without capturing the center," Mark Goshko, the president of Massachusetts Log Cabin, had told me. "Log Cabin's endorsement assuages the concerns of moderate Republicans and independents that a candidate is too far to the right."

"In 1992, Bill Clinton managed to keep the extreme of the Democratic party in tow," said Goshko. "The Republican party needs to do the same thing this year. If it fails, we lose."