The revealing of Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-ID) conviction for lewd behavior in a men’s bathroom is in some ways a more poetic form of justice than the unmasking of Mark Foley’s pederasty, given that Craig has a solidly anti-gay voting record, whereas Foley was of a more libertarian stripe.
But both cases raise an interesting question. The number of closeted Republicans in D.C., while certainly significant, can’t be particularly high either. The upper echelon of conservative Washington has to be small as it is, rendering 3-odd percent of that yet smaller. So Craig and Foley have to be a non-trivial chunk of the D.C. closeted Republican population. One could certainly surmise from this that illegal pick-up methods (e.g., soliciting pages online, cottaging) are inordinately popular among closeted Republicans.
The reason for this is obvious: being closeted closes off normal, public dating methods. And being a Republican yet furthers their paranoia about being outed, because political, in addition to social, costs are now in play. So while being closeted is bad to begin with, being a closeted Republican is just a recipe for not-particularly-savory dating methods.