WWW- In The Architect, a new book chronicling Karl Rove’s life and conservative agenda, authors James Moore and Wayne Slater, reveal Rove’s father, Louis Rove, was homosexual.

Louis Rove left his family during the 1969 Christmas holidays and moved to Los Angeles where he eventually “came out.” According to Rove’s father’s best friend, an openly gay man named Joseph Koons, “Louie didn’t hide the fact that he was gay. But he didn’t play it up either.” The Architect describes Louis Rove as a shy man, encumbered by his three hundred pound figure. To encourage Rove to socialize, Joseph Koons, invited him to join a retired gay men’s group called the “Old Farts Club,” jokingly referred to among the men as the “Rainbow Casket.”

Karl Rove frequently visited his father in the 1980s. Joseph Koons said he didn’t sense “any great tension” between Karl and his father.

Rove keeps a photograph of his father on his White House desk and has remarked to reporters that his father “lived life exactly the way he wanted to live it.”