With ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law, Gay Conservatives Find Their Inner Ernst Röhm
If this were the 70s, they’d be calling Anita Bryant a gay icon.
(Photo by Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
Ernst Röhm is one of the most pathetic, contemptible figures in LGBT history. The commander of the Nazi Stormtroopers and Hitler’s friend, Röhm was widely known to be gay, but still wielded considerable power within the Nazi hierarchy. That was until the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler had him executed, which the party justified based on his sexuality as it cracked down on gays throughout Germany.
Röhm embodies a longstanding archetype in the LGBT world: the gay man who joins an anti-gay right-wing political movement for a taste of power, wealth and fame, oblivious to the whispers behind his back and mistaking phony politeness for tolerance or even acceptance. That same spirit exists today among gay conservatives in the US such as the Log Cabin Republicans. That’s not to say they’re comparable to Nazis – they’re not – but they share Röhm’s lack of self-respect and willingness to throw the whole LGBT community to the wolves because they foolishly think they have something to gain from aligning with people who hate them.
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Few things exemplify that more than gay Republicans’ defense of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law on March 28. In a March 14 column, David Leatherwood, head of Log Cabin’s Tampa, Florida, chapter, went so far as to call DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw a “gay icon.” What earned her a title usually reserved for the likes of Lady Gaga, Eartha Kitt and Joan Crawford was that she called it an “anti-grooming bill,” insinuating that opponents – which primarily means LGBT people – are pedophiles.
The “leftist gays stormed the Florida Capitol building” and were “demanding kindergartners have access to state-sanctioned lessons on pronoun propaganda and gay butt sex,” Leatherwood wrote in a dispatch from whatever alternate universe he inhabits, also referring to opponents of the bill as “groomers.” “Christina dropped a bomb that annihilated their entire phony narrative and put them all on defense.”
Leatherwood deliberately misrepresents what were actually peaceful protesters – many of them LGBT youth – not to mention the law and opponents’ concerns about it.
For starters, the sexually explicit material he vulgarly refers to is fictitious. The real concern is that the law would create a chilling effect by empowering parents to sue schools because a teacher mentioned a same-sex spouse or a student’s gay parents, while it also discourages LGBT students from seeking mental or physical health services as it could result in schools having to reveal their sexual orientation or gender identity to their parents. These concerns are hardly unfounded given the vague language in the law, which has already spawned imitators in other states.
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Pushaw made her animus all the more obvious in a Monday tweet in which she suggested that if the hostile climate the law is likely to create results in LGBT people leaving Florida, the state “will be better off without them.”
Leatherwood’s dishonesty, praise for a homophobic bigot, flippant puerility and overall insincerity are galling enough. But his perpetuation of the myth that LGBT people are pedophiles is irresponsible and reprehensible.
In response to the law and opposition to it, notably by Disney, “groomers” memes have spread rapidly as a way to express thinly veiled homophobia, much as QAnon was already a thin veil for antisemitism.
Sure, Leatherwood differentiates between “normal, sane gays” and “the Left’s agenda to sexualize our children.” But having followed the Christian right and its assault on LGBT people for years, I can say that when those people talk about “the homosexual agenda,” they make no such distinctions — they see every one of us as an enemy to destroy. And they vilify us as “groomers” for a very sinister reason.
There’s a centuries-long history of justifying discrimination and violence against minorities by painting them as a threat to children – especially white or Christian children. Look at how many pogroms started with a Blood Libel accusing Jews of murdering Christian children and using their blood in rituals. Or how many Roma have experienced violence or had their own kids taken away due to the myth that they abduct white children. Or how many lynchings of Black men and boys followed false accusations of raping white girls.
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The myth that LGBT people are naturally inclined or more likely than others to sexually abuse children with the goal of “recruiting” them – despite ample evidence to the contrary – serves the same purpose, which is to exploit people’s natural desire to protect children in order to dehumanize and justify subjugation of a minority seen as a threat to Christian patriarchy. This myth has been behind countless anti-LGBT laws, from California’s Briggs Initiative in 1978 to the wave of constitutional bans on same-sex marriage in 2004.
That a gay man would help perpetuate such a destructive canard about his own kind says a lot about what the Log Cabin Republicans have evolved into since their founding in California in the 1970s, in response to the nationwide anti-LGBT backlash at the time. Back then, the Republicans were a big-tent party like the Democrats, believing in liberal democracy and encompassing a range of ideological viewpoints. Even Ronald Reagan publicly opposed the Briggs Initiative.
But times have changed.
Today’s Log Cabin Republicans would have defended the Briggs Initiative and declared Anita Bryant a gay icon. That’s not because of self-hatred, but because the GOP of 2022 has no coherent ideology or principles, having degenerated into an openly autocratic party only interested in power. Naturally, Log Cabin has degenerated along with it.
That would explain a party that used to have real policy ideas for addressing real problems and a genuine interest in governing, but today is defined almost entirely by what it is against, usually caricatured fantasies of “socialism” and “wokeness.” Where Lionel Trilling called conservatism irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas, today’s conservatism is idiotic, own-the-libs trolling that seeks to resemble irritable mental gestures.
The purpose of the GOP’s pursuit of power is to secure and expand the wealth and privilege of well-connected rich people while maintaining white, male, Christian dominance. That is the order of things, and minorities like LGBT people are allowed to sit at the table on sufferance, provided they help the Republicans maintain power with donations and votes and don’t upset that order by complaining about mistreatment. In exchange, they get tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy, along with the thrill of feeling like they have power or proximity to it.
Thus, being an LGBT conservative is to politics as being an Instagram influencer is to employment. It’s so fun and carefree, owning the libs while basking in glamour, shaking hands with important people and experiencing the ecstasy of having clout, connections and an illusion of the respect and prestige you never got to have as a closeted teenager.
That doesn’t mean conservatives love LGBT people back.
In November, Log Cabin raved as Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel spoke at the group’s “Spirit of Lincoln Gala” at Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort, announcing a voter outreach partnership. But conservatives were outraged, with some calling for her resignation and forcing her to apologize and assure them that the Republican Party’s anti-LGBT policies remained intact.
And last month, when conservative commentator Dave Rubin announced that he and his husband would have a baby through surrogacy, former Trump administration lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted this:
“No amount of ‘respectful’ dialogue can overcome the inconvenient truth that the homosexual lifestyle is morally wrong. I love my friend Dave Rubin, but I do not support his lifestyle or raising children with two dads.”
That was in response to remarks by Rubin in an interview with Glenn Beck where he said, with the obsequious pandering to bigots typical of gay conservatives, “I get why the right has these, what I would argue, are often legitimate fears because the left does not stop eating civilization.”
But like all civil rights issues, LGBT rights are not about left versus right – they’re about democracy versus authoritarianism. It just so happens that American authoritarianism, particularly of the white Christian supremacist variety, has found a home in the GOP, much as it did among the Southern Democrats in the 1950s.
Pushaw’s invocation of the LGBT-as-pedophile canard, McDaniel’s rapid backpedaling and Ellis’ homophobic response to Rubin’s announcement should give a sense of how much friendship and love these people truly feel for LGBT people, which is to say absolutely none. They feel only hatred and contempt and would be overjoyed if we just went away.
Don’t believe me? Look at the 2016 Republican platform’s explicit calls to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and Republicans in multiple states resisting efforts to repeal sodomy laws made unenforceable by the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision. That means they aim to strip our relationships of any legal protections and throw us in prison.
LGBT conservatives know their love for the GOP goes unrequited, and that the party only tolerates them insofar as it can milk them for votes and money and tokenize them to conceal its bigotry.
Sexual orientation does not predict one’s political views, but at some point, you have to realize when someone is only pretending to be your friend so they can use you. LGBT conservatives apparently haven’t yet.
Maybe that’s because they think this is all fun and games. Maybe they think the GOP’s homophobia and transphobia is just politics and isn’t real. Maybe they think that if the generation-long conservative Supreme Court majority secured by Trump overturned Obergefell or even Lawrence, their connections, wealth and political affiliation would protect them. Maybe they think it’s okay to side with fascists because they’re “good” right-wing gays, not “bad” liberal ones and will thus be safe.
Ernst Röhm thought he was safe too.
Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @alaricnyc.
