Hess is always “a little out of reach” to quote Mr. Yes, there are those artfully staged flashbacks, but Mr. Hess remains something of an enigma to the audience, which is why his real-life story may seem so tantalizing to viewers. On weekends, they would head for their farmhouse in West Virginia, which was stocked with three dogs they had gotten through the Humane Society.
The couple lived during the week in an apartment at the Wyoming, a grand old prewar building on Columbia Road. He slowly came to grips with his sexuality as he moved into adulthood, dating a series of men and then settling into a decade-plus relationship with Steve Dahllof, who worked in public relations for the Food Marketing Institute, then the National Restaurant Association. Hess, who grew up in the Midwest, was raised in a Catholic family and graduated from Notre Dame and the George Washington law school. You might have also spotted him around town D.J.-ing, something he did at local clubs and at a radio station at George Washington University, where he was known for his eclectic taste, which ran from Grace Jones to the Grateful Dead. It was here that you might find Michael Hess, a lawyer for the Republican National Committee during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and something of a regular (at least during his early days in Washington). There was an outdoor area where people could drink and look at the stars, but even that was shielded from public view. The slightly down-at-the-heels-looking bar, which attracted a lot of Hill staffers, few of them fully out of the closet back at the office, featured occasional drag shows and a crowded dance floor, and had the distinctive architectural feature of no windows looking out onto the street, giving patrons a level of protection, a cocoon of safety from unwary passers-by. In the early-to-mid 1980s, if you were a gay man in Washington working in politics, chances are you ended up on L Street near Capitol Hill, at a bar called Lost & Found.
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