You're reading "The Fire is Upon Us"? I've pointed to Darren J. Beattie's calling Buckley gay. https://twitter.com/DarrenJBeattie/status/1333802838036684809

A 1988 biography by John B. Judis has Buckley referred to, as a boy, as a "mama's boy" who was "a little bit effeminate"-off with his sisters, not playing sports, etc. In officers' candidate school, he stopped his platoon to pick a flower, an apparent ode to Oscar Wilde. A later close friend, Murray Kempton, recalled Buckley as "womanly."

His wife was a flamboyant woman who dressed like a drag queen.

Buckley had a deep queer history.

He was friends with Roy Cohn, who appeared five times on Firing Line. Buckley and his wife were said to have gone to a gay bar with Truman Capote. Buckley was friends with Whittaker Chambers, the Soviet spy who defected, who was gay, and made him an editor at National Review.

Buckley was friends with Bob Bauman, a Republican congressman, who was gay-though in 1980, Bauman was caught soliciting a 16-year-old.

Then there was that thing with Gore Vidal who called him "the Marie Antoinette of American politics." Norman Mailer called him a "fag."

Buckley was listed as gay in The Homosexual Handbook.

A blind item.

https://www.crazydaysandnights.net/2020/07/blind-items-revealed-5-reader-blind-item.html

"He spent a lot of time with homosexual prostitutes from a specific procurer. He would often tell his favorites that he would refer to them on his TV show by assigning them an obscure word, Latin or English, and then use the word on his show that week."

If the level of deception seems unthinkable, cases like Paul Pressler remind that it's very thinkable.