Rodney Walden

Rodney Walden is a LGBT activist who lives and works in Austin and San Antonio-- and has had a law practice in part devoted to those issues.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign calls him a peddler of “false Internet garbage.” Arianna Huffington found his scoop insufficiently sourced and refused to run it on her site.

But nonetheless, Glen Maxey, a former Texas state legislator—the only openly gay one in its history—has shoved into public view what was previously only fodder for cocktail party chatter among reporters and politicos. Last week, he self-published an e-book filled with salacious details about Perry’s personal life peddled by anonymous sources of dubious credibility alleging the swaggering, coyote-killing governor of Texas has had a string of male lovers. Gawker ran with Maxey’s tales, creating a one-stop location for “All Your Rick Perry Gay Sex Rumors Collected in One Handy Book.” Politico took a more sober approach, focusing on Lin Wood, a well-known Atlanta lawyer who defends those caught up in legal and other scandals. Several blogs focused on gay issues wrote pieces about the "controversy."

Maxey’s book, Head Figure Head: The Search for the Hidden Life of Rick Perry, focuses on his work with an unnamed reporter on the Perry story. That reporter was Jason Cherkis, who works for The Huffington Post, which never published on the Perry sexuality rumors. Arianna Huffington told Politico she spiked the story because “we realized that it was not a publishable story,”—not because of a threatening letter set by Wood to Huffington and Cherkis. Reporter Jason Cherkis, meanwhile has said that the problem was simple: they needed the two sources he spoke with to go on the record.