Book About Gays in the 60s Make America Great Again
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For Gay Conservatives, the Trump Era is the Best and Worst of Times
Within the emboldened, if hardly unified, ranks of the L.G.B.T. right.
Ben Holden: "Demographics shouldn't be destiny." Credit... Peyton Fulford for The New York Times
Hannity is a buffoon," Ben Holden said, maybe a bit likewise loudly. Holden was drinking disappointing sangria with a friend at the bar of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where he had come final February more out of curiosity than reverence for the president. He was in boondocks for his first Bourgeois Political Action Conference (CPAC), an effect that he took seriously enough to wearing apparel up for (dark suit, American-flag tie) but that he was also interested in for its anthropological weirdness. A 23-year-former educatee at Suffolk Academy in Boston who is gay and "leans conservative," Holden planned to take copious notes and write a gonzo-style journalistic piece most a political gathering known as much for its raucous parties as its provocative speakers.
Holden wasn't the only young L.G.B.T. person in the Trump antechamber that nighttime. A few feet away, several conservative gay and bisexual journalists and activists reclined on couches. Among them was Charlie Nash, a tweed-wearing 21-year-erstwhile British reporter for Breitbart who described himself to me as a pagan, an absurdist and a right-wing environmentalist. Next to Nash was Lucian Wintrich, the 30-year-old former White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, a conspiracy-peddling far-correct website founded by another gay homo, Jim Hoft, to "expose the wickedness of the left." Wintrich is perhaps best known for his Twinks4Trump photo serial, in which he photographed lithe young men wearing Make America Corking Again baseball caps.
At the bar, Holden and a fellow Suffolk student were joined by a heavyset homo in a colorful checkered shirt. Earlier telling them his proper name (and asking that I non use it), the man introduced himself past way of a toast: "We're going to build that wall! Nosotros're going to make America great once more!"
Holden'south friend challenged the man to an arm-wrestling contest before having 2nd thoughts. "Actually, my masculinity is not worth sweating over in a nothing-sum situation," he said.
"That's nonsense!" the man told him. "In that location'south an economic benefit to masculinity."
This led to some back-and-forth well-nigh economic science and gender theory before Holden's friend relented and assumed an arm-wrestling position at the bar. The showdown didn't become his mode. "I think you got help from the Russians," he said.
"Collusion!" the human being shouted with delight.
Before long, it became clear why he had joined the students in conversation: to hit on Holden, who is alpine and broad-shouldered and has big, protruding ears that add together to an aura of youthful affability. But even equally the man flirted he confided that he was deeply closeted and, in fact, saw his same-sex attractions equally a kind of affliction. However, he wanted Holden'southward telephone number.
Holden couldn't chronicle to someone with shame virtually his sexual orientation, nor to those he called the "loud gay Trump fanboys," referring to people like Wintrich and the former Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who are both categorized by the Anti-Defamation League as "alt light," a designation given to those the system says "are in step with the alt-right in their hatred of feminists and immigrants, among others." Wintrich and Yiannopoulos have made careers out of social media trolling and incendiary campus speeches tailored to outrage progressive students. (Wintrich titled a 2017 talk "Information technology's O.One thousand. to Be White.") Holden saw them as gay minstrels producing a kind of garish, campy performance art meant more to daze than to make a cogent argument. He wasn't sure what they actually believed.
For his part, Holden said he believed his sexual orientation was one of the least interesting things most him. "Being gay is not an accomplishment in and of itself," he told me, "so I'1000 reluctant to pb with information technology or believe that it should dictate how I think almost health intendance." Holden was increasingly skeptical of tribalism and extremist elements of both parties; he seemed almost traumatized after attending the live CPAC taping of "Hannity," describing some in the oversupply as "maladjusted and mindless" and "dredged upward from the brutal American hinterlands."
Though he said he is liberal on almost social issues and wishes the Republican Political party would accept climate change seriously, Holden aligns himself with conservatives and libertarians in many other means — he'southward anti-abortion, free-market-oriented and skeptical of big authorities. Just perhaps above all else, Holden rejects what he considers a boulder of contemporary liberalism: that, as he put it, your "immutable characteristics" — race, ethnicity, sexual orientation — "should make up one's mind what your position is on every political issue, or what you're allowed to express an stance near." He added that he feels alienated from progressives on his campus and across the land, many of whom he believes are unwilling to argue issues "without resorting to shaming or proper name-calling."
Holden certainly didn't endear himself to most students on his campus when he showed upwardly to classes wearing a MAGA hat a calendar week before the 2016 presidential election. In retrospect, he said, he wasn't proud of his back up for Trump. "I think I did it by and large out of spite," he told me. "It was a kind of 'F y'all' to the left and the Democratic Party, which is doubling down on intersectionality and identity politics."
Afterward barely an hour at the bar, Holden and his friend returned to CPAC'south host hotel, the Gaylord National Resort in National Harbor, Md. Holden considered the Gaylord a plumbing equipment name for a conference with many openly gay attendees, including Log Cabin Republicans (a conservative Fifty.Yard.B.T. group founded in 1977), Fox News analysts, transgender women and students from across the country.
Gregory T. Angelo, a 40-year-old longtime communications specialist who until recently was the president of the Log Cabin Republicans, told me that he had never seen so many openly gay conservatives at CPAC. "They're coming out in recent years in a way they take non earlier," he said. Guy Benson, 33, a conservative writer and Fox News on-air contributor who came out publicly in 2015, told me that the conservative gay movement has become diverse plenty in the past few years "to have multiple constituencies with vastly different priorities and political styles."
Many 50.Thou.B.T. conservatives say they experience newly relevant and accepted in the Republican Political party, which has long opposed L.M.B.T. rights. And, perhaps counterintuitive, some attribute this in part to Trump himself. "The narrative on the left tends to exist that Trump is horrible for L.G.B.T. people in every way imaginable, simply that'southward not how many gays on the right meet it," Benson told me. "As a candidate, Trump signaled that Fifty.G.B.T.-related culture wars are not ones the G.O.P. needs to be fighting anymore, and much of the base noticed. Every bit flawed as Trump is, and despite some of his unfortunate policy moves on this front end, he might actually represent a fulcrum point within the party on gay issues."
Some gay conservatives feel so emboldened, in fact, that they "shout about their dear of the president and their 50.G.B.T. identity from rooftops," Angelo told me. (By "rooftops," he more often than not meant Twitter.) Standing in front of the Log Cabin booth at CPAC, next to a affiche affirming the organization'south support for the Second Subpoena, Angelo didn't shout, simply he did axle as he showed me a letter Trump wrote in 2017 congratulating the group on its 40th ceremony. Trump is the starting time sitting Republican president to publicly commend the system.
What a departure three years can make. In 2015, CPAC wouldn't even let the Log Cabin Republicans set up a booth at the conference. But at present here they were, snapping pictures in front of their booth and poster ("This will be certain to trigger my entire school at once," a Log Cabin intern said) and basking in enthusiastic thumbs-ups from convention attendees. Though Angelo conceded the Republican Political party "withal has piece of work to do" on Fifty.M.B.T. problems, he insisted the future has never looked brighter. "Information technology'south a skilful time to be a gay bourgeois," he said.
The reality, I would come up to learn, is a bit more complicated than that.
In that location have historically been few practiced times to be a gay conservative. Gay Republicans accept spent the better part of several decades beingness excoriated from all sides, largely rejected by their party and alternately mocked and reviled by many in the L.G.B.T. customs. When I asked Rob Smith — a 36-year-old Republic of iraq War veteran and former Democrat who is now a conservative — about the longtime narrative associated with gays in the G.O.P., he didn't hesitate. "Self-hating queens," he said.
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Gay conservatives take offered endless provender for comedians. David Letterman took a shot during the 2004 Republican National Convention: "Y'all know the Log Cabin Republicans — they hate Hillary Clinton, merely they love what she'south done with her hair." Jimmy Dore, co-host of the Immature Turks' "The Ambitious Progressives" web serial, joked during a 2007 standup routine, "They're gay Republicans — they're people who are gay and, on purpose, are Republicans."
When not mocking gay conservatives, comedians — besides as many in the L.G.B.T. community — have delighted in the sex scandals of closeted gay Republican lawmakers across the state, who oftentimes voted against gay rights even equally they solicited gay sexual activity in restrooms, hired male escorts or hooked upwards with men in their congressional offices. But gay Republicans have likewise long been seen past many in the L.Thousand.B.T. customs as no laughing thing. They're routinely denounced for supporting a political party that only 4 percentage of L.G.B.T. people view as "friendly" toward the 50.G.B.T. community, according to a 2013 Pew poll.
Gay Republicans accept typically offered two reasons for remaining loyal to a political party that offers picayune reciprocation. The kickoff is that while they wish the political party were meliorate on L.G.B.T. issues, they prioritize other concerns more. "Why should I be a Democrat when I disagree with Democrats on most bug?" Sarah Longwell, the 38-year-former chairwoman of the Log Cabin Republicans, asked me. "I became interested in conservative ideas, particularly economical ideas, in loftier schoolhouse. I knew I was bourgeois before I knew I was gay." In a video on the home page of PragerU, a conservative video site, Guy Benson explained his political priorities: "I'1000 a Christian, a patriotic American and a gratuitous-market place, shrink-the-government conservative who also happens to be gay."
Only gay conservatives also speak of their party affiliation as a kind of public service. Many take insisted for decades that their presence in the K.O.P. (their "place at the table," as some put it) has helped it evolve, yet slowly, on L.Grand.B.T. rights. In recent years, gay and lesbian conservatives have been specially eager to accept fractional credit for the legalization of same-sex union. "Y'all weren't going to have the cultural shift on gay marriage without Republicans talking to Republicans near gay nobility and why gay marriage is of import," Longwell said.
In a new documentary about the Log Cabin Republicans produced past the organization, longtime members also champion their 2004 lawsuit to overturn "don't inquire, don't tell," the Clinton administration policy on gay, bisexual and lesbian service members, which the system opposed considering information technology required service members to muffle their sexual orientation. "It was Clinton and the Democratic Party that passed 'don't ask, don't tell,' " a Log Cabin member says on camera. "We fought that for 20 years."
Listening to gay Republicans have credit for gay civil rights victories is a listen-bending exercise for many L.Thou.B.T. people. The writer and sex-communication columnist Dan Savage, who has publicly called gay Republicans "firm faggots," told me that "the 1000.O.P. continues to be an anti-queer political movement, and these useful idiots continue to let themselves be used by the political party to inoculate itself against charges of homophobia and transphobia."
Though L.G.B.T. activists have never had particularly nice things to say nearly gay Republicans, the rhetoric has been dialed up in the Trump era. Kevin Sessums, a magazine author and author who prolifically rails against Trump and Republicans on his popular Facebook page, has called gay Trump supporters "Vichy gays" for what he describes as their "collaboration with a fascist and deeply homophobic regime." Recently, when a gay and formerly liberal power couple from New York were profiled in The Times as Trump supporters, the reaction was fierce. "These people are vile, despicable gay men," the writer and gay activist Michelangelo Signorile wrote on Twitter.
[Read how a gay and liberal couple became two of N.Y.'s biggest Trump supporters.]
Savage, Sessums and Signorile don't lack for evidence when information technology comes to the Republican Political party's connected Fifty.1000.B.T. problem. Though Trump claimed while a candidate that he would be a "better friend" to L.One thousand.B.T. people than Hillary Clinton would, gay rights advocates insist that he has failed to govern that way. "The coordinated, systematic onslaught of attacks on L.Yard.B.T.Q. civil rights has been unprecedented in scale and scope," says Chad Griffin, the president of the Homo Rights Campaign, an L.G.B.T. civil rights organization, calculation that in Trump's first year alone, "at that place were dozens of rollbacks, rescissions and executive orders attacking basic rights and protections."
Transgender Americans accept borne the burden of those efforts. Trump has tried to block transgender people from serving in the military and reversed several Obama-era policies that protected transgender Americans from discrimination in workplaces, schools and prisons. But gays and lesbians haven't escaped unscathed. In improver to more than symbolic gestures, similar failing to recognize L.Yard.B.T. Pride Month, Trump has taken a plethora of anti-gay actions "to pacify the intolerant base of his party," says Jimmy LaSalvia, a longtime gay conservative activist who left the One thousand.O.P. in 2014. On the aforementioned twenty-four hours as the transgender military machine ban announcement, for example, the Trump administration landed two other blows against L.Yard.B.T. rights: The Justice Department argued that the 1964 Ceremonious Rights Act's ban on sexual practice discrimination doesn't protect American workers on the basis of sexual orientation, and Trump nominated a longtime gay rights foe, Sam Brownback, as his ambassador at large for international religious freedom, a State Department position. (As governor of Kansas, Brownback signed an executive social club in 2015 prohibiting the state authorities from penalizing religious groups that deny services to married same-sex couples.)
Still, many of Trump'south L.1000.B.T. supporters dispute that Trump is bad for gay people; at CPAC, a Log Motel Republicans flyer boasted of "fighting the 'imitation news' about our president." Gay conservatives similar to cite Trump's nomination of the openly gay Richard Grenell equally ambassador to Germany equally prove that Trump has "no personal counterinsurgency toward 50.Yard.B.T. people," as Angelo put information technology.
Critics of the political party'due south positions on L.G.B.T. issues take other targets besides the Trump administration. The almost obvious is the 1000.O.P.'due south breathtakingly anti-Fifty.One thousand.B.T. 2016 platform, which implicitly affirms conversion therapy for minors, claims that assuasive transgender people to use the restroom matching their gender identity is "dangerous" and argues for the superiority of heterosexual households. Angelo called it "the most anti-Fifty.G.B.T. platform in the party'south 162-year history."
And yet, many L.Yard.B.T. conservatives — including Angelo — insist the political party today is no longer an inhospitable place for gay people. Some, like Lucian Wintrich, get and then far equally to say that "information technology's liberal propaganda to advise that the right today is anti-gay." Others are more than cleareyed about their political party's shortcomings but say the platform, which is voted on by a commission dominated by social conservatives, is, every bit Angelo told me, "functionally meaningless" and "doesn't represent the views of the Republicans I know."
Angelo, who said the Log Cabin Republicans had a fasten in membership and social media followers in 2016, believes that this greater G.O.P. openness largely explains why increasing numbers of young conservatives are coming out of the closet and "speaking their minds." Only other gay conservatives told me that Trump has simultaneously had an opposite effect. Andrew Sullivan, arguably the most influential (and controversial) conservative gay vocalism of the last iii decades, told me he knows many politically moderate gay conservatives who have decided to "go along their heads downward" during the Trump era. "Considering they know that during this period of the Smashing Awokening, opposing Trump is not enough to satisfy the far left," said Sullivan, who still considers himself center-right politically fifty-fifty though he has supported Democratic presidential candidates since 2000. "Anything less than completely accepting the far left's worldview will become you attacked as racist, or misogynistic, or ableist, or whatsoever slur the mob settles on."
Considering how much criticism L.1000.B.T. conservatives face from exterior their ranks, I was surprised by how oft I heard them disparage one another. The assimilationist-minded Log Cabin Republicans, the Trump critics similar Sullivan, the deliberately trollish Yiannopoulos acolytes and the conservative-leaning college students coming of age in an era of greater social acceptance have seemingly little in mutual too their sexual orientation — and their oft-stated distaste for identity politics. I routinely heard conservative gays criticize other conservative gays as ineffective, boring or empty vessels. "What I see right now in the bourgeois L.1000.B.T. community are a lot of Twitter trolls and some social media celebrities," Rob Smith, the Iraq vet, told me. "What I don't come across are a lot of move leaders."
Non long before CPAC terminal twelvemonth, I asked Doug Hattaway, a gay Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, if he counted whatever gay conservatives as proficient friends. He did not, he told me, though he recently had gone on a Tinder date with a Trump appointee. "It did not get well," he said. But Hattaway was friends with a gay erstwhile conservative — a 32-year-old named Ryan Newcomb, who worked in the White House during the George Westward. Bush administration and whom Hattaway describes as now being a "raging progressive." Hattaway invited Newcomb to join us that nighttime for a drink at a bar in Washington'southward Logan Circle neighborhood.
The same 24-hour interval, I spoke by phone with a longtime gay conservative who served in Trump's presidential campaign. (Though he is out of the closet, he asked me not to apply his name so he could speak freely well-nigh his personal life. I'll phone call him C., the kickoff letter of the alphabet of his first name.) C. was having a rough week. His liberal boyfriend of about a yr, whom C. was "head over heels for," had decided, after much consternation, that he couldn't continue seeing a Trump-supporting Republican. Though C. was devastated, he said he'd had plenty of practice being rejected by gay Democrats. He'd had men storm out of first dates with him, yell at him in bars and pour drinks on his head.
I didn't expect anything that dramatic to happen when I invited C. to join Hattaway, Newcomb and me at the bar. Equally nosotros waited for C. to arrive, Newcomb reclined in his seat with a drinkable and scrolled through his cellphone contacts, amazed at how many right-leaning gays he knew. I heard something similar from Tim Miller, a gay former communications staff member for Jeb Bush, who told me he was surprised by how quickly a community of generally young, openly gay conservative men has formed in contempo years in Washington. (Conservative lesbians often have less luck finding community. Sarah Longwell told me that she personally knew merely a scattering of conservative lesbians, and that her spouse and all her close lesbian friends are Democrats.)
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When C. finally arrived, it didn't have long for talk to plough to Trump. "I however can't believe he'south president," Newcomb said, shaking his head in atheism.
"Why?" C. asked.
"Because he's non worthy of the championship."
"Well, he won," C. said, annoyed.
Bad-mannered silence ensued. Shortly, C. left. "I tin stomach gay Republicans," Hattaway said one time C. was out the door. "But a gay Trump supporter? They know it'southward indefensible, so off they go."
But many gay Trump supporters aren't so quick to run from a fight. In tardily 2017 I visited Chadwick Moore, a 35-year-onetime former liberal and writer for the national gay magazine Out who is now i of the nearly combative L.1000.B.T. conservatives on social media and on Play a trick on News, where he is Tucker Carlson's go-to gay on the supposed hysterics of the gay left. During a June segment well-nigh a Huffington Post piece calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-A for its by donations to groups opposing L.G.B.T. rights, Moore gleefully drank from a Chick-fil-A loving cup as he mocked "pearl-clutching lefty gays" he deemed "drastic for villains" considering they have "no 1 left to hate."
Moore — who has repeatedly defended the Proud Boys, a far-right men's group of cocky-identified "Western chauvinists" that was banned on Facebook and Instagram after 10 members were arrested on charges of riot and attempted assault in New York in October — insists that the existent threat to gay people comes from Islam. A strain of Islamophobia is mutual among some gay conservatives here and abroad, including in France's far-right National Rally party (formerly called the National Front), which, though it opposes same-sex marriage, reportedly had more gay people in leadership roles in 2017 than whatsoever other major party in the country. "Pray for Le Pen," Moore tweeted in support of National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen before last yr's French presidential ballot.
This electric current iteration of Moore would likely come equally a surprise to the old version, who voted for Hillary Clinton. Moore "came out" as a conservative not long subsequently he wrote an Oct 2016 Out cover story about Yiannopoulos that was harshly criticized as too sympathetic by many 50.G.B.T. journalists. When I met with Moore on the patio of a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to talk about his political metamorphosis, he had come directly from a taping of Carlson's show and was all the same on an adrenaline loftier. Though he was friendlier and more introspective in person than he is on social media, it was difficult to take him seriously when he said things like "David Duke is actually a leftist" and "What'south not to love about Trump? He's a drag queen. He'due south a cartoon character. He's fabulous. He'southward a Kardashian!"
I was curious how much of Moore'south persona was Yiannopoulos-inspired performance art that he didn't really believe but that was gaining him more notoriety than he enjoyed as a writer for Out. I likewise wondered whether Moore's schoolyard mocking of the gay left (sample tweet to Glaad, a group focused on L.1000.B.T. media coverage: "Grow a pair, ladies") was retribution for being publicly rebuked by his 50.1000.B.T. colleagues and eventually shunned past his longtime gay friends.
Unsurprisingly, Moore rejected both theories, insisting that as a member of the mainstream media, I couldn't possibly understand him or portray him positively. "I like myself so much more than and am so much happier" as a bourgeois, he said, merely that's "going to exist left out of your article, because it's besides uplifting." He no longer supports Democrats, he explained, because the contemporary left is dishonest, hysterical and obsessed with policing spoken communication. Worse yet, the left is no fun anymore. "If you love mischief, if you lot love upsetting delicate people, I don't know where else yous would exist right now than the gay right," he told me.
Though Moore and Lucian Wintrich rarely passed upwardly an opportunity to throw shade at each other when I spoke with them — Moore calls Wintrich "the dumbest person on the cyberspace," while Wintrich says Moore is "stealing Milo'due south tired act" — they share a belief that their contemporary brand of conservatism is channeling a subversive, onetime-school gay spirit.
"Existence gay used to be virtually being transgressive and pushing the culture," Wintrich told me in late 2017 in the Washington apartment he lived in at the fourth dimension, which was decorated with huge framed Twinks4Trump photographs. Wintrich, who attended Bard College and could even now laissez passer for a brooding pupil at the famously liberal school, smoked a cigarette near an open kitchen window. "When did gay men get so boring?"
In April I traveled to northwest Oklahoma to meet Colton Buckley, a 24-year-quondam gay cowboy in the midst of a Republican primary campaign for a seat in the Oklahoma Business firm. A self-described "God-fearing, gun-toting gay," Buckley hoped to correspond Ellis County, a sparsely populated area that may accept more than feral pigs than Hillary Clinton supporters. Of the 1,766 canton residents who voted in the 2016 presidential election, merely 155 backed Clinton.
That was expert news for Buckley, ane of the youngest Trump delegates to the 2016 Republican convention and ane of more than 20 Republican L.G.B.T. candidates who competed in federal or local races in the 2018 election, co-ordinate to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a political action committee. (Five of these candidates won.)
Buckley, who came out publicly later on the mortiferous 2016 terrorist shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, told me that his primary opponents were trying to utilize his sexual orientation against him. "At that place's a whisper campaign going on," he said, as he collection around Ellis County in his pickup truck, wearing jeans and a cowboy hat. Buckley told me he opposes both aforementioned-sex marriage — "for biblical reasons," he said — and what he calls "the homosexual agenda." (When I asked for sample agenda items, Buckley said it was less of an actual listing and more of a "catchall phrase for a liberal doctrine.") Buckley summarized his political beliefs this way: "I'1000 1 of the most conservative gay people you'll always come across."
Buckley lives in Arnett, a small, barren town with only i identify to get a beer — a dive bar called the Longhorn with signage you might expect to discover at the after-party for a women's rodeo ("Cowgirl Motto: Party 'til He's Cute"). The Longhorn'due south communicative owner, Stacy McCartor, had also outfitted the place with Buckley campaign signs. She didn't intendance that he was gay, she said, though she worried that others would. "If just you were a lesbian — guys can wrap their heads around that!" she told him.
I watched Buckley give a short version of his stump speech communication to 3 men in their 30s sitting around a table drinking. And then Buckley pulled out his telephone to play a video from his entrada website, in which he shoots an AR-15 burglarize after defiantly asking, "What part of 'shall non be infringed' do yous non understand?"
The most talkative of the iii men didn't know that Buckley was gay, and finally he asked why I was there taking notes. "This is a journalist," Buckley told him, "and he wants to know how a young man who lives in rural Oklahoma and who is running for part as a Republican is also a fag." (Buckley told me he often used derogatory terms "to disarm voters who would potentially shut down based on my sexual orientation.")
The man looked confused. "I'thou going to demand a couple more than beers," he said finally.
After gathering his thoughts, he told Buckley that he was "in the incorrect surface area to be doing this. People around hither ain't gonna vote for you." He said he didn't personally have a problem with gay people before suggesting, a few minutes later, that Buckley might eventually acquire to appreciate the contrary sex. "You don't accept no interest in a woman?" he asked.
"Nope," Buckley said, adding that he didn't choose to be gay. "Why would I live in a rural area and exist a Republican and a Christian and cull something where everybody'due south gonna hate me?"
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"I don't detest you," the human being said. Before long, in fact, he almost seemed fix to play matchmaker. "Practice yous take whatsoever interest in anyone here in town? Any fellas?"
Buckley offered him a selection. Would he prefer a candidate who is straight but who wants to heighten taxes, as Buckley suggested one of his opponents did? Or would he prefer "a faggot that's going to fight for your gun rights and make sure your taxes don't get raised"? The human didn't hesitate. "The faggot," he said. Buckley turned toward me. "See? That'southward why I'1000 going to win this race."
Buckley turned out to exist wrong about that — he finished in third place with simply 26 percent of the vote. When I texted him after the primary to ask if he thought he would have made the runoff had he not been openly gay, he didn't hesitate. "Aye," he wrote back. Just Buckley didn't regret coming out. "The fact that I'm running honestly, bringing all of myself to the table, is a testament to how things are changing in this country for gay people," he told me. He suspected that had he been born v or ten years earlier, he would take run equally a closeted candidate. "That'due south what most gay conservatives did until now," he said. "Or they didn't run at all."
If an openly gay cowboy running for office was a surprise to Republicans in Ellis County, conservative transgender activists were an equally unexpected sight at concluding twelvemonth'south CPAC. Three transgender women, including Jennifer Williams, a 50-year-old regime contractor from Trenton, walked around the Gaylord holding an Fifty.1000.B.T.-pride flag and small signs that read: "Proud to be Conservative. Proud to be Transgender. Proud to be American. #SameTeam."
They knew they had their work cutting out for them. Williams, who is running for the state'south General Assembly, told me that while most mainstream Republicans wouldn't cartel be openly contemptuous of gays and lesbians anymore, there's no similar reprieve for transgender people. She described an endless barrage of antitransgender rhetoric from conservatives, including from some gay men (both Wintrich and Moore used the transgender slur "tranny" in their conversations with me) and from prominent voices like Ben Shapiro, who has called transgenderism a "mental disorder." At CPAC, Shapiro told the crowd that "y'all don't become to tell petty boys they tin get piffling girls just to avert offending people."
The mean solar day after Shapiro's speech communication, I watched the transgender women engage in a lengthy discussion with several immature men, including Ben Holden and some other conservative gay college student. In what occasionally felt like a fence, Williams tried to get them to understand that transgender people face many of the same smears — that they're mentally unstable and a threat to children in restrooms — that were aimed at gay men non long ago. Their conversation was momentarily interrupted when a immature white nationalist walked betwixt them, handing out his business carte and suggesting that his organisation "is going to be the hereafter, because we have stuff similar this" — meaning transgender people — "we have to bargain with." Though jarring, the disruption offered Williams and the students something they could agree on: White nationalism is bad.
I could think of few lonelier identities than that of transgender conservative activist, and I wondered whether Williams considered leaving the party after she transitioned in 2015. She had, she said, simply she decided against it partly because "I was a Republican long earlier I was transgender," adding that her politics — including limited regime, a strong armed services and free-market policies — however marshal her more closely with Republicans.
Like many L.One thousand.B.T. conservatives, she besides held out hope that her party might modify. Jimmy LaSalvia, the longtime gay conservative who left the party in 2014, told me that he had watched several waves of gay conservatives take similar hopes dashed over the decades: "I've seen so many fight the good fight, then become disillusioned that the party isn't irresolute and become independents or Democrats," he said. "So a new group of immature gay conservatives appears, and they know almost nada of this history, and they again insist that the party will change."
Williams'due south initial optimism in 2016 was shared by many Fifty.Yard.B.T. conservatives, who watched as candidate Trump "fabricated rather unprecedented public moves for a Republican to declare himself on the side of L.Thou.B.T. voters," recalls Patrick J. Egan, a political scientist at N.Y.U. who researches 50.G.B.T. voting behavior. Trump hawked "LGBTQ for Trump" T-shirts on his entrada website, held up a pride flag during a campaign effect and presided over what Angelo, the former Log Cabin president, chosen "the virtually gay-friendly convention in 1000.O.P. history." That's a low bar, to exist certain, but for some Log Motel members who witnessed Pat Buchanan's virulently anti-gay voice communication at the 1992 Republican convention, Trump's willingness to say the term "Fifty.Grand.B.T.Q." from the stage and to offer the PayPal co-founder and openly gay bourgeois Peter Thiel a prime number speaking slot was "deeply meaningful," Angelo said.
But information technology wasn't meaningful enough to earn Williams's support — or that of many Fifty.G.B.T. people. Trump received simply 14 percent of the community's vote, according to leave polling, significantly less than the 22 per centum who backed Hand Romney in 2012. One reason, Williams said, was Trump'south selection of Mike Pence, who has a long history of opposing L.Yard.B.T. rights, including suggesting that same-sex union might cause "societal plummet," as his running mate.
Still, Trump's announcement as president that he would cake transgender people from serving in the military came every bit a surprise to Williams. "Information technology felt like somebody sucker-punched me," she said. Simply many gay conservatives I spent fourth dimension with played down the importance of Trump'south record on transgender rights. "I think the trans effect gets more attending than it warrants," says Jamie Kirchick, a center-right gay writer and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who opposed Trump's war machine ban but who believes "the gay motility has been overtaken past transgender issues affecting a minuscule percentage of the population." Rob Smith, the Republic of iraq veteran, channeled the feelings of many gay conservatives I spoke to about transgender rights when he tweeted: "A 'adept' gay in 2018 must: Lengthened his masculinity at all costs. Never question a trans person. Ever."
The unwillingness of many gay conservatives to prioritize the struggle of transgender people comes as little surprise to Richard Goldstein, a gay former executive editor for The Village Vox who published "Homocons," a scathing book nigh gay conservatives, 17 years agone. Though Goldstein doesn't view them with the aforementioned scorn he once did (he sees their ability to live openly gay lives as proof of "the gay left's success making it possible for every gay person to be themselves"), he remains disappointed by what he sees as their inability to empathize with marginalized communities. "These are mostly white gay men who are pretty comfortable and who can't seem to sympathise that many in the Fifty.G.B.T. customs are still not safe and demand protection," Goldstein said.
That seeming lack of compassion as well struck Alexander Chalgren, who for a time was arguably the most famous young Trump supporter in America. The former deputy managing director of Students for Trump, Chalgren, at present a 21-yr-onetime student at Cornell, was featured on a 2016 episode of "This American Life," during which he said that only considering he was gay and black didn't mean he had to exist a Democrat. Just by the time I met Chalgren at CPAC, he had begun to sour on the president. He was particularly disheartened past Trump'due south reaction to the 2017 white-supremacist marches and violence in Charlottesville and past his transgender military ban, which Chalgren chosen needlessly roughshod. "I don't have respect for a typhoon dodger who won't let other people to serve," he told me.
When I talked to Chalgren over again in November, he said he had lost all faith in Trump — and was disgusted by the Republicans' "complete capitulation" to him. "I don't consider myself a Republican anymore," he told me. "I'll be voting for Democrats in 2020."
Amid some Fifty.M.B.T. conservatives there's a contention that Chalgren's feel is rare, and that the real motility is among people — both straight and gay — fleeing the Autonomous Political party, though the just evidence for this is anecdotal. In the 2018 midterms, in fact, 82 percent of 50.G.B.T. voters supported their Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives, an increase over the three previous midterm ballot cycles, according to NBC News go out polling. The aforementioned polls show a decline since 2014 in Republican Political party identification among L.1000.B.T. voters, though the proportion who identify every bit "bourgeois" has held steady at 14 pct.
A leading proponent of the Democratic-flight theory is Brandon Straka, a gay 41-year-old hairstylist and longtime liberal from New York who became disillusioned with the Democratic Political party and announced in a YouTube video last May that he was walking away from it. The #WalkAway hashtag became a sensation on right-wing social media, and Straka organized a #WalkAway march and rally in Washington 10 days before the midterm elections.
I met Straka the forenoon of the event at the Trump International Hotel; he had come from an advent on "Fox & Friends," which apparently caught the attention of Trump, who promptly tweeted nearly the march. Though it was raining, about 500 people (the crowd would later at least quadruple, past my estimate) gathered for a premarch rally at a park. Some came bearing signs. 1 read "I never dreamed I'd abound up to be a lamentable, but hither I am killing it. #WalkAway," while some other read "Not a Bot," a reference to reports contending the movement's popularity was inflated by Russian social media accounts and other agents of disinformation.
Epitome
Many of those in attendance at the premarch rally said they were longtime conservatives — or "WalkWiths," equally they called themselves. But I also met longtime Democrats and formerly "closeted conservatives," people like Lynzee and Michelle Domanico, a married lesbian couple who in 2018 launched The Cupboard on the Correct, a website for "people living in fear" of being "shunned, abandoned and vilified" for their bourgeois beliefs. As I spoke with Lynzee and Michelle, another lesbian walked by and said: "More lesbians for Trump. We honey Daddy!"
The most interesting conversation I had that forenoon was with a married lesbian couple in their 60s who had until recently lived in San Francisco. The quieter of the pair, Jill, seemed surprised and not altogether comfortable that her contempo political metamorphosis (from "San Francisco liberal" to political contained) had brought her here, only feet from a man holding a sign critical of Planned Parenthood. "I'thou walking away — I'm simply non certain what I'm walking away toward," Jill told me. "I'm not a Democrat anymore, but I'k not gear up to embrace Trump or to align myself with Republicans. I'm a Jew, I'grand pro-choice. The evangelical wing of the party would keep me away."
Attending the rally had been the thought of Jill's married woman, Ann, who expressed frustration with a contemporary Democratic Party she insists has lost its mind — and its priorities — in the Trump era. "I don't hear whatever coherent vision for what the Democratic leadership believes in — most of what I hear is abiding demonizing of Trump and his supporters," she said. "I told Jill: 'Permit's say I had a MAGA hat on. I wouldn't, but let's say I did. How far do you recollect I'd get down the street in New York, San Francisco or Berkeley earlier somebody spit on me or striking me?' That's non my Democratic Party. Old-school Democrats — we fought for the right of people nosotros disagreed with to be able to speak, fifty-fifty when we thought their positions were offensive and incorrect."
Among the gays and lesbians I spoke with at the rally, in that location was a prevailing belief that while the L.G.B.T. community'south loyalty to the Autonomous Party may have made sense in the past, information technology doesn't at present and won't in 2020. Every bit many gay conservatives see it, most Fifty.G.B.T. people are now fully assimilated and are as secure as any other Americans.
Whether L.M.B.T. people feel secure in this country could accept profound implications on the future of the customs'due south vote, says Patrick Egan, the N.Y.U. political scientist. He believes that as 50.Thousand.B.T. people feel increasingly alloyed, they could become the mode of one or the other of two traditionally Autonomous constituencies: Jewish voters, who have mostly remained loyal to the Democratic Party as they have assimilated, or non-Hispanic Catholics, who gradually shed their partisanship. He suspects that will depend partly on the degree to which L.K.B.T. people go on to run across themselves as outsiders.
Egan notes that marginalized groups can feel insecure even when protected by police, as L.G.B.T. people increasingly are. In a 2015 Washington Mail service article, he proposed asking "any legally married gay couple this question: Where do you feel comfortable holding your spouse's hand in public?" For most gay couples, he suggested, the list of safe places is a brusque one. Until that changes, Egan suspects 50.M.B.T. voting behavior won't.
There's another factor that could curb whatever meaningful L.Thousand.B.T. migration toward the Republicans. The Fifty.G.B.T. community, Egan says, has been "deeply infused with the notion of coalitions with other disenfranchised groups. There'southward a sense among many rank-and-file voters that these fates are linked."
Egan suspects that's partly why Trump got so little 50.G.B.T. support. Longwell, the Log Cabin chairwoman, agrees. "For many Fifty.Yard.B.T. people, it didn't matter how positive candidate Trump's posture was on gay bug," she says. "It couldn't recoup for the alarming way Trump talked about women and minority and immigrant communities," adding that many L.Thousand.B.T. people are as well members of those groups. Though Longwell tin envision the day L.G.B.T. young people don't automatically vote Democratic, she told me that volition depend on what the Republican Party looks like after Trump. "I don't believe that the party at this moment is compelling for many young people, gay or direct. In fact, I worry that we're losing a generation."
In October, Ben Holden sabbatum with three other bourgeois students at a table in a pupil center on the campus of Suffolk University backside a imprint promoting their chapter of Young Americans for Liberty (Y.A.F.), a national conservative pupil activist organization.
The iv club members were white men, a stark dissimilarity to the diverse students at tables effectually them. Holden recognized the eyes problem while also lamenting that he had to think that way. What y'all expect similar shouldn't make your argument any more than or less valid, he said: "Demographics shouldn't exist destiny."
During the hour I sat with the club members, only one person — a reporter for The Suffolk Vox, the school'southward online pupil publication — stopped to chat with them. "You guys causing drama?" the young reporter said with a grinning. (Y.A.F. is used to ruffling feathers. In Apr the group invited Christina Hoff Sommers, a critic of contemporary feminism, to campus.)
"Not enough, unfortunately," Holden told her. "We're only here showing people we're even so alive."
"Oh, they know," she said. "Especially later your little Twitter escapade."
The reporter was referencing a short video Holden and Y.A.F. posted to Twitter on Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day, during which Holden said he was "coming out every bit a conservative." Almost as an reconsideration he added, "Also, I'm gay. Not that that really matters anymore." The video drew some outrage on Twitter, with one young adult female writing that "this parasite is mocking a twenty-four hours that was created to spread awareness about a community that is oppressed every unmarried 24-hour interval."
Despite making the Coming Out Day video, Holden played down the relevance of his sexual orientation to his politics. Almost conservatives his age "couldn't care less that I'm gay," he told me. Though he conceded that "the left is responsible for most of the progress on gay issues," he believes that "now information technology'south more a generational issue than a left vs. right one."
Holden was keener to talk over his favorite class this semester, "Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the Slap-up Philosophical Novel." He said that the course was causing him to re-evaluate his motivations and those of everyone else in the earth. It was besides making him even more suspicious of conversations (political or otherwise) "where one or both people have a predetermined conclusion," he said.
He reminded me that he's only 23, and that though he leans politically conservative at this moment in his life (and plans to return to CPAC in late February), he doesn't want to be forever wedded to 1 ideology. "But nosotros live at a time when y'all're expected to pick a side, and to stick to it without giving an inch or admitting that the opposing side might not take malicious intent," he said. Nigh every time we spoke over the past year, Holden lamented this polarization, which he said had an impact on students on his campus, cable-news commentators and seemingly everyone else. Holden had hoped to put together a "smart and nuanced" panel at Suffolk about immigration policy, for case, but he wasn't certain such a affair was possible.
"Trying to engage people in a thoughtful debate virtually ideas during the Donald Trump era seems like something very few people want to do," he said. "I spend a lot more time thinking about how to exist during this time of political lunacy than I exercise about being a gay conservative."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/magazine/gay-conservative-trump-era.html
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