I was chatting with some friends yesterday when I came to a realization:
The era of the “gay conservative influencer” is over.
The idea that someone could be both gay and conservative sprung from the marriage debate, which the Left used to pit gays against their enemy, those dastardly Republicans.
Before that point, plenty of men who have sex with men enjoyed lower taxes, didn’t need abortions, and were uncomfortable with importing people from majority-Muslim countries who would be happy to behead them at first sight, to paraphrase Coulter.
Gays could be *natural conservatives* – far more than Hispanics allegedly are every election cycle.
The Left saw this and were gearing up for a fight.
After all, it was Clinton who enacted DADT and DOMA, it was Mrs. Clinton and Obama who ran in 2008 against gay marriage, and the Westboro Baptist Church leader was a perennial Democratic candidate.
The Left picked a battle in California called NoH8, where civil unions and marriage were legally indistinguishable, and voters were about to affirm Yes on 8, a proposition to establish that marriage in the state of California is between a man and a woman.
NOH8 was the original Kony 2012 or Stand with Ukraine – a celebrity-driven marketing stunt to influence the opinions of otherwise politically-uninterested people.
Imagine “Rock the Vote”, but with a better agent.
Gay protestors attacked Mormon temples. Demographics in favor of traditional marriage, such as Hispanic Catholics and Black Christians, were chastised. JavaScript and Mozilla founder Brendan Eich was forced out of a job for donating to Yes on 8. Mayor Alan Autry of Fresno and other community leaders were threatened.
Tantrums aside, Yes on 8 passed in California, marking the last conservative victory in the past decade and a half.
In a familiar move as of late, courts looked past the will of the voters and ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Later, through the Obergefell decision (which was argued in favor by conservative Ted Olson, Bush’s Solicitor General, and supported by Log Cabin Republicans), gay marriage was finally the law of the land.
Conservative gays were first against the wall, finding a home not among the Left nor the Right. Overtures were made by the New Right to welcome them back like GOPROUD, a program sponsored by Chris Barron, Jimmy LaSalvia, Andrew Breitbart, and Ann Coulter among others, but it was a delicate tightrope to walk. Religious members of the Right, recently abused by gay extremists, were suspicious of gay conservatives, and the Left called gay conservatives “self-hating”.
2016 upended the card table. Here you had a guy who was for/didn’t care about gay marriage from the start and blasted YMCA at every rally.
Trump is the most successful drag queen in history, and he didn’t have to frack to get there.
Gay conservatives loved Trump, and he loved them back.
In the culture, however, gay conservatives were still treated like an oddity, a zoo animal.
The only one who broke through successfully was Milo. The positive and negative attention it brought him nearly destroyed him. He was an early victim of deplatforming and has been heard from little since.
Some gay conservatives fired back and became outspoken. And good for them! The way gay conservatives were brutalized by the media, who could blame them?
In Milo’s absence, the Gay Conservative Influencer (TM) was born, bringing the shake-chugging, skinny tea dipping, “pay money for my widely-available workouts” grift to the right.
Because the gays can’t have anything nice, the GCIs also brought along the worst aspects of gay culture – victimhood, catfishing, and overall lack of substance.
Breitbart’s frequent maxim of politics being downstream of culture did not mean “emulate the worst possible aspects of culture” in a red, white, and blue tank top.
The idea of “influencers” is counting one’s social impact by one’s follower count.
But that’s just one metric that’s growing increasingly irrelevant in determining actual impact, and half those followers are bots anyway.
When it comes to the political world, actual impact is making substantive change – like canvassing communities to sign up voters, original reporting, getting the right candidates in office from a local level – real “rubber meets the road” kind of stuff.
Flitting between CPACs and conferences and hawking meaningless products and programs amounts to nothing.
The result of the 2020 election brought an end to most of the worst offenders, and I’m sure they’re gearing up to record tearful “why I’m leaving the Right!!!” videos to salvage the grift yet again.
But not all hope is lost!
Some gays on the right have done it right.
Peter Thiel is a whipsmart investor and fundraiser.
Andy Ngo is a noted reporter who risks life and limb to get the story out.
Scott Pressler has done more get out the vote work than the entire RNC the past few years.
Ric Grenell was nominated by Trump as the first openly gay member of a presidential cabinet and has been a strong advocate for electoral reform.
Chadwick Moore is the creator of Outspoken and frequent Tucker guest.
And there’s the always entertaining Christian Walker – because if you’re going to be a public personality, at least have good comedic timing.
The death of the influencer era has brought along a new opportunity – one for genuine action, thoughtful discussion, and meaningful change.
The fight to put parents in control of their children’s school boards, to counter the endless Marxist woke identity politics nonsense, and to create a new culture instead of becoming a victim of the existing one — that’s the future of the Gay Right.