Austria Confronts a Leader’s Gay Sexuality

By DAN BILEFSKY

Published: October 23, 2008

PRAGUE — There were rumors for years, but they were widely ignored in Austria, a conservative nation not much interested in prying into the private lives of its leaders. Now, grieving over the death of Jörg Haider, the charismatic far-right politician, the country has been forced to confront directly the question of his sexuality after his political successor asserted that Mr. Haider had been “the man of my life.”

“We had a special relationship that went far beyond friendship,” the successor, Stefan Petzner, a former fashion and cosmetics reporter, said Sunday in a highly emotional interview on Austrian Radio 3. “Jörg and I were connected by something truly special. He was the man of my life.”

Mr. Petzner, 27, took over the Alliance for the Future of Austria after Mr. Haider, 58, died in a car crash on Oct. 11. He had been drinking at what has been reported as a gay club before flipping his car at nearly twice the legal speed limit.

Officials at Mr. Haider’s party, which gained more than 10 percent of the votes in September elections, tried to limit the political fallout from the statement by dismissing Mr. Petzner as head of their parliamentary group and denying that the men were lovers. However, their requests that the radio interview not be rebroadcast were rebuffed by Austrian journalists.

Mr. Haider, the governor of the province of Carinthia, was the son of a shoemaker whose parents were both active Nazis. He rose to national prominence in Austria over the last two decades, championing traditional family values, railing against the European Union and calling for an end to immigration. Married with two children, he had cultivated a macho, man-of-the-people persona.

While the country has been convulsed by a somewhat un-Austrian outpouring of emotions, Austrian commentators said the effective outing of Mr. Haider had been underplayed or largely ignored in the Austrian news media, which tend to shy away from the private lives of politicians and other national figures.

Vienna has an active gay community, but homosexuality remains a taboo in some more conservative parts of society, and Mr. Haider’s supporters are intent on preserving his legacy as a traditional family man.

Just Thursday, the Web site of one prominent Austrian daily, Kurier, gave big play to a story about the doubts of Mr. Haider’s widow, Claudia, on the circumstances of his sudden death. She was pictured behind his coffin with their two grieving daughters.

Reinhold Gaertner, a political science professor at Innsbruck University, said the reaction had been muted because a cult of Mr. Haider had grown since his death and his legions of supporters were intent on mythologizing him.

“It has been an open secret for years that Haider was gay, and most Austrians would have preferred for it to remain a secret,” he said. “People are trying to turn Haider into a saint, and are quickly forgetting that he was a right-wing xenophobe.”

While other European Union countries like Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium have legalized gay marriage, and politicians in neighboring Germany have willingly outed themselves, Mr. Gaertner said same-sex partnerships remained underground in Austrian political life. There was little debate in Austria on same-sex partnerships, he added, because advocating equal rights for gays was not a vote winner.

Christian Hogl, a spokesman for Hosi, Austria’s oldest gay rights group, said the allegations about Mr. Haider would have little effect on public attitudes toward homosexuality because most Austrians would choose to ignore them.

“I am surprised that it has not been greeted as a bigger deal, but that is because people are still in denial,” he said.