Was dead crypto-fascist Austrian Jörg Haider also homosexualist? Well, no. Like Cary Grant, he was married to a woman. But whose company did he fancy? An absolutely delicious piece by Ilya Marritz offers clues.
“Newspapers didn’t want to say ‘gay’ bar. More like ‘scene’ bar or ‘trendy’ bar…. There was this homophobic tone…. You know, ‘Should a governor do something like that?’ ” [...]
Like former New Jersey governor James McGreevey, Haider relied on hetero bonafides… to deflect inconvenient questions. Like why Haider’s closest aides (Stefan Petzner was merely the latest) seemed always to have a Y chromosome and be height-weight proportional. [...]
In 1994, Haider made Karl-Heinz Grasser, a 25-year-old with dimples like David Duchovny’s, deputy governor of Carinthia. “He had no qualifications whatsoever,” Krickler says. “Everybody was wondering about it.” [...] Then there was Franz Koloini, “der schöne Franz” (“handsome Franz”), the waiter who became Haider’s personal secretary at age 22. [...]
What about Petzner, at 27? Was he the One?
Einicher flattens his palms and holds them perhaps 10 inches apart. “That’s what he liked about Petzner,” Einicher says.