Originally published on March 3, 2005: Governor Romney has been touring the country in the past few weeks, courting anti-gay right-wingers in South Carolina, Missouri, and Utah with speeches designed to show that he is firmly in their camp. Yet a look at Romney's record shows that his Rick Santorum drag act is a relatively new phenomenon.

In 2006 Governor Mitt Romney tried but failed to shut down the Massachusetts Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. The Commission, the first agency of its kind in the country, was started in 1992 by Governor William Weld to address alarming suicide attempt rates among GLBT youth.

Originally published on August 25, 1994: Mitt Romney's campaign for the U.S. Senate hit a snag last month when four members of his Mormon congregation alleged in a Boston Globe article that Romney referred to lesbians and gay men as "perverse" in a November, 1993 speech.

Originally published on June 13, 2012: My relationship with Mitt Romney began in the early 1990's. As you know, he's good looking, smart and seems like a great catch. It seemed like heaven when we first met; he said he was a fiscal conservative and a social progressive.

Originally published on November 21, 2006: Susan Ryan Vollmar's editorial on the political motivations behind Romney's highly-touted November 2006 rally in support of an anti-gay constitutional amendment in Massachusetts.

Given his recent obsession with fighting marriage equality, slashing funds for every LGBT program in the state budget and generally characterizing gay people as aliens ("Some of them are even having children born to them," he fretted incredulously last year to a group of South Carolina Republicans), it's kind of funny that back when Mitt Romney was looking to unseat Ted Kennedy from the U.S. Senate he just loooooved the gays. Or at least he pretended to, since he certainly hasn't shown this side of his personality since he collected that endorsement donation from the Log Cabin Republicans back in his 2002 gubernatorial campaign. Here are a few excerpts from Romney's Aug. 25, 1994 interview with Bay Windows.

The fact that there's intense interest in a letter Mitt Romney wrote to the Massachusetts Log Cabin Club 12 years ago in which he pledged to be a more ardent advocate for gay rights than U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy isn't a surprise. Romney is an all-but-declared candidate for president who's staked his candidacy on social conservatism. Any hint of hypocrisy on Romney's part with regard to LGBT issues is of great use for political reporters, GOP primary opponents and LGBT activists alike. What is surprising, though, is the depth of Romney's hypocrisy.

Publication of an editorial in Bay Windows referencing a 1994 letter Mitt Romney wrote during his 1994 U.S. Senate bid to unseat Ted Kennedy unleashed a frenzied effort by media researchers and activists to find the letter. In the letter, which was written to the Massachusetts Log Cabin Club, Romney pledged to provide more effective leadership on gay equality than his opponent, U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Editor Susan Ryan Vollmar's editorial on the political motivations behind Romney's highly-touted November 2006 rally in support of an anti-gay constitutional amendment in Massachusetts.

Governor Romney has been touring the country in the past few weeks, courting anti-gay right-wingers in South Carolina, Missouri, and Utah with speeches designed to show that he is firmly in their camp. Yet a look at Romney's record shows that his Rick Santorum drag act is a relatively new phenomenon.