CRANSTON -- As a student at Bowdoin College a generation ago, Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey wrote humor columns for a campus newspaper that even he now acknowledges could be construed as homophobic.

For example, in one column in the Bowdoin Patriot, the paper published by campus Republicans, Laffey wrote, "I have never once seen a happy homosexual. This is not to say there aren't any; I simply haven't seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet. All the homosexuals I've seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life."

Laffey, who is challenging incumbent Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, said he regrets writing that and other articles denigrating gays. But he chalks it up to undergraduate hijinks, saying, "In college we engaged in sophomoric political satire."

Asked if any of the columns represented his views, Laffey said in an interview at his Cranston home yesterday, "No. Not now, nor then, or ever . . . Do I regret writing some of these things? Sure. But at the time, we were just having fun. We thought it was funny."

Laffey, now 44, wrote the columns in 1983 and 1984, when he was an undergraduate. The Providence Journal received the articles anonoymously in the mail earlier this week. Laffey confirmed that he was the author, but said that whoever sent the material to The Journal was part of a "desperate" attempt to smear him in the days before the Sept. 12 primary.

In one column, Laffey asked rhetorically, "Why is the pop music of today so bad? Because it is communist to the very core. It's turning the children of America into sissies and preying on the minds of every American, making them weaker and weaker."

"And how about this humanoid (I'd hesitate to say person, and I would never use the word MAN) Boy George," wrote Laffey. "It wears girl's clothes and puts on makeup. When I hear it sing, 'Do you really want to hurt me, do you really want to make me cry,' I say to myself, YES, I want to punch your lights out, pal, and break your ribs.

"I say let's get those pinkos out of the music business and replace them with some tough conservatives," wrote Laffey.

In one column, Laffey describes his political views as making President Ronald Reagan "look leftist.'

Laffey wrote that he views politics in "black and white." And he stated that the nation should return to the values it held before Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. "We must strive to return our country to the position it occupied before 1930 -- one of limited government, free enterprise and rational values."

Laffey said that he studied a lot at Bowdoin; he did well enough at the prestigious, Brunswick, Maine, college to win acceptance to Harvard Business School.

The Republican newspaper was an outlet for his energies and his writing was "over the top" because writers for the GOP student newspaper competed for outrageousness with students who wrote for the more liberal Bowdoin Orient, the established campus newspaper.

Laffey said he never drank or did drugs in college because he came from a family that had been damaged by drug abuse and drinking. "I never did coke. . . . I never smoked a doobie."

His opponent, Chafee, has acknowledged using drugs while an undergraduate at Brown University.

"When I first arrived at Bowdoin in the fall of 1980 the leftists were in complete control," said Laffey, in a 1983 column. "To be sure the freedom lovers outnumbered the statists but they had been cowed into submission by the liberals."

He urged fellow conservative students to "keep standing up for individual freedom, for free trade, for less government and the flat tax."

With reports from staff writer Mark Arsenault

smackay@projo.com / (401) 277-7321

EXTRA: See a sample of a humor column by Stephen Laffey in a campus newspaper, at:

http://www.projo.com/extra/election/2006/laffey_column_0826.pdf