Opinions
Progressive LGBTQ community should not throw conservative siblings under the bus
Queer people are not just Democrats
I have been an LGBTQ activist for almost 10 years, but I’ve never really felt like I’m a part of the LGBTQ community.
I remember how I was thinking about it when the idea of this article came to my mind: I was at a sex-positive queer event in a local library, at a book launch about neurodiversity and inclusion. It should be “my” topic: I’m a transgender autistic person after all. The event was amazing, wasn’t it? It was.
Only why did I feel so lonely, so out of place?
The folks around me felt like a community; most of them were so obviously gender non-conforming, obviously queer, and obviously leftists. They shared the same aesthetic, the same culture. But I was silently scrolling through my social media feeds, reading about the Chechen liberation movement’s history, weapons, and political news and my mind wandered. I was thinking about how I told my Chechen Salafi friend that I wanted to have a big family with eight kids and live in a village when I was a 4-year-old.
At four, I already knew that I’m not a girl, even if I didn’t have words for describing my condition. I have never heard about other trans* people. I was a trans* child without knowing it.
Then I became a trans* teenager in denial: A messy one, depressed, Christian fundamentalist teenager who compulsively read everything about the Cold War. An anti-leftist teenager who shared Henry Kissinger’s views on international politics and Ayn Rand’s view on the economy.
In my teenage years, I saw other trans* folks, but only on a TV screen. In mass culture, the trans* community is all about cross-dressing and drag queen parties in the worst case, and about being part of leftist social movement in the best. So, I couldn’t be trans*, couldn’t I? One of the reasons why it was so difficult for me to accept myself as a trans* was that I believed that if you are trans*, you should instinctively accept mainstream LGBTQ subculture.
I have changed a lot since then, and became an open LGBTQ activist, but when I read about Jessica Watkins, a transgender hardcore Donald Trump supporter who was arrested after the Washington riot on Jan. 6, I felt like she is the person I needed to hear about when I was younger.
I’m so not like her.
Watkins is an Afghanistan war veteran and a member of the far-right group Oath Keepers, and I’ve always, even in my childhood, hated the far-right, and have never supported the American invasion of Afghanistan. I do not think that I would like Trump populism and anti-intellectualism, even in my youth. But as a young transgender person, I desperately needed to see some proof that I could be trans* without falling into some social movement, that it is possible to be a transgender without having to fit into a long list of criteria from the mainstream LGBTQ community, and that transgender people could be different, just like everyone else.
This is why I felt outraged when some American LGBTQ people in social media supported a transphobic decision to put Jessica Watkins in a male prison.
On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, the situation worsened. The American LGBTQ community is taking a dangerous turn on excluding their politically “unreliable” siblings, and by doing it, helping anti-queer bigots to push their agenda of dehumanization of queer people in general.
Queer as a doctrine
Many homophobes believe the LGBTQ movement had some kind of ideology beside promoting equal rights. This myth existed for decades. In the Western conspiracy theories, homosexuality, and transgenderism are considered to be connected to leftist political schools of thought. During the McCarthyism era, LGBTQ people were discriminated against and sometimes even incarcerated partly because they were considered to be potential Soviet spies. It is a peculiar idea, because at the same time homosexual people in the Soviet Union were considered to be Western sympathizers. Or maybe it is less weird as it looks — people are often prone to be seen as a threat to someone who belongs to a minority they do not understand.
This is why many modern-day conservatives believe that if a child came out as queer, it means that this child was groomed by “cultural Marxism.”
But there is something else. The media — both progressive and conservatives — are to blame for this misconception.
The most common image of a queer person in the media is an image of a politically left, secular, eco-friendly, pro-choice person who likes to speak about their sexual kinks, has bright colored hair, and votes for Democrats. But if you would think twice, you would realize that all those things have nothing to do with being gay, bisexual, or trans*. It’s just some trends in LGBTQ community.
Some gay people are conservatives: Get over it
There are actually a lot of Republican LGBTQ. Some of them are quite prominent, like Richard Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany who was also the first acting director of National Intelligence during the Trump presidency, which made him the first openly gay Cabinet-level official. He is quite a controversial figure for an LGBTQ community because of his anti-trans* sentiments and for criticizing the Equality Act, but it doesn’t make him less “gayish.”
Gay conservatives often have a complicated relationship with their sexuality, struggle to accept themselves. Former Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock had a long history of fighting inner homophobia before he managed to come out as a gay man, but it is more likely going to change for Zoomer and Alpha generations.
The list of modern-day LGBTQ Republicans is quite big, and there are even groups like Log Cabin Republicans, or The Rainbow Pro-life Alliance.
LGBTQ Donald Trump supporters host their own MAGA events, “Trump UNITY,” and basically have their own “LGBTQ culture,” separated from a mainstream LGBTQ movement for quite clear reasons.
Of course, not all LGBTQ Republicans are pro-Trump, and even not all LGBTQ conservatives are Republicans.
The fact that LGBTQ conservatives exist nowerdays is nothing unusual or new. Even in the 70’s when being LGBTQ was something far away from the acceptable norm, there were some openly right-wing queers and queer rights supporters in America. Actually there is a big difference between being socially conservative authoritarian who sometimes even economically-left, and economically conservative libertarians, because those movements often hate each other.
American economic conservatives, libertarian-right politicians and thinkers, like Ralph Raico, speak up for LGBTQ rights, and this is the reason why some LGBTQ became libertarian-right.
As for a social conservative authoritarian right, there were gay people even among members of an openly Nazi organization, National Socialism League.
The times are changing, and there will be more conservative people, including Republicans, who would accept themselves like gay, trans* or bi.
As Neil J. Young, author of “Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Rights,” noted in one of his interviews, “the proliferation of more people who identify as LGBTQ will mean a growth of people who identify as gay Republicans.”
This is not just a Western trend.
Amir Ohana, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, for example, is the first openly gay Knesset speaker in Israeli history
Hence, even such an openly anti-gay movement as the so-called Islamic State somehow had gay people among their members — of course, those people have never openly said that they are gay because the risk of being executed, but it is known even in the authoritarian apocalyptic Islamist cult there were LGBTQ people. And while “ordinary” ISIS members were sometimes slaughtered for the accusation of being homosexual, high-ranking ISIS fighters like Abu Zayd Al-Jazrawi, a prominent Saudi fighter and commanders, who was accused of same-sex activity, was flogged or received a less serious sentence.
So, LGBTQ conservatives, including conservatives in quite extreme ways, are literally everywhere. Then why didn’t we notice them?
A self-fulfilling prophecy
Let’s put aside cases such as the possibly gay ISIS member, and think closer to home.
The reason why most visible LGBTQ Americans are progressive is not just about actual politics of Democrats and Republicans on queer issues, but partly is a self-fulfilling prophecy: After a gay, bi, or a trans* a young person became estranged to their conservative family, this person allied themselves with the mainstream LGBTQ community, who could reject him if it didn’t share their ideas.
So, LGBTQ youth have to make a choice that cis hetero kids don’t have to even imagine being forced to make. You could be literally anyone and be cis-hetero, but for being accepted as a queer person you are often forced to be part of a subculture.
By denying conservative LGBTQ people the right to be themselves, progressive media and LGBTQ activists made conservative anti-queer conspiracy about “cultural Marxism grooming” look more reliable, despite the fact that Karl Marx wasn’t particularly interested in sexuality and gender identity issues, and have nothing to do with modern minority rights movements.
But for conspiracists, gender identity and sexual orientation are seen not as part of human diversity, but something ideological.
Why do we need to change it?
The LGBTQ community is about gays, bisexuals, and trans* people. It is not about being left or right, Republicans or Democrats. The LGBTQ movement is a human rights movement at its very core; it is about the idea that you should have the same civil rights as anyone else. If we continue to deny politically “inconvenient” LGBTQ people those rights, we basically rob ourselves of a core idea of the LGBTQ movement. I strongly believe that Q-Anons and MAGA supporters in general are guilty of the deaths of some LGBTQ youth, especially trans* kids who died by suicide, because of the influence that Q-Anon’s “grooming” rhetoric has on the Republican mainstream nowadays, bringing back ideas from 80th Satanic panic and anti-queer conspiracy theories.
But if we would deny LGBTQ people who support Donald Trump their rights to be part of the LGBTQ community, we would be no better than the most hardcore MAGA supporters.
Civil rights have to be universal or they don’t work at all.
Even if we are speaking about rapist and a serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who also happened to be a gay man, it’s more than fine to say that he should be locked in prison for the rest of their lives, but in any we have no rights to discriminate against him because of his sexual orientation, or try to erase their homosexual identity to made gay community to look more “decent.”
LGBTQ people are human, and if we deny them a quality to make wrong choices or even different choices, we are denying them part of essential human traits. If we would go into gatekeeping, the core idea of LGBTQ activism lost its meaning.
Opinions
The global cost of Trump’s foreign aid ideology
Expanded global gag rule polices people’s identity
U.S. Vice President JD Vance on Jan. 23 announced the new Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance Policy. This policy, which has nothing to do with flourishing, is part of the Trump administration’s effort to weaponize U.S. foreign assistance to enforce ideological conformity, to police people’s identity, and to suppress dissent — both at home and abroad.
One of the policy’s three pillars advances a discriminatory framework that denies transgender people’s existence and seeks to censor organizations that affirm transgender people and their rights.
The new policy expands the Mexico City Policy, also known as the global gag rule, which has restricted U.S. foreign aid to non-U.S. civil society organizations providing abortion care under every Republican administration since 1984. What is new — and unprecedented — is the expansion of this rights-restricting logic to efforts addressing gender identity and, more broadly, nondiscrimination efforts.
The new policy also applies to more categories of aid recipients, including multilateral organizations such as UN agencies.
With the expanded global gag rule, the Trump administration seeks to make transgender people invisible globally, as it has within the U.S. Whether it is threatening steep tariffs for countries that resist Trump’s appetite for Greenland, or withholding funds for organizations that refuse to toe the ideological line, the chilling message is clear: standing in the way of the administration’s political or ideological goals will come at a high cost.
Under this rule, organizations risk losing U.S. funding if their activities are seen to fall under the spurious concept of “gender ideology.” Organizations are not allowed to provide, refer for, or support access to gender-affirming care. Neither can they offer accurate information, counseling, or public-facing support for transgender people. The restrictions even apply to cultural activities such as “drag queen workshops, performances, or documentaries.”
Organizations that receive any foreign aid from the U.S. will need to censor themselves, even if their own national or regional laws enable — or oblige — them to speak up for human rights.
This new policy comes after the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has for decades provided the bulk of U.S. international development and humanitarian assistance.
To be clear, LGBT people, regardless of where they are, do not depend on the United States to organize, advocate, and stand up for their rights. And foreign aid is not the answer to undoing global inequity. But the sharp reversal of U.S. foreign policy will have wide-ranging consequences.
For years, protecting the rights of LGBT people had been a core tenet of the U.S. commitment to human rights. U.S. embassies often functioned as safe havens for human rights defenders in places where governments stoked homo- and transphobia for political gain. For LGBT people in the 65 countries that still criminalize same-sex intimacy, civil society-run clinics, supported with U.S. funds, became life-saving spaces — people could get HIV and other care there without fear of being turned away, ridiculed, or reported to the police.
Much of this is progress is now at risk. As a result of the U.S. funding cuts, organizations that directly provided health care and other services for LGBT people were forced to stop services abruptly, cutting off people’s access to chronic medication often without alternative care in place.
The impact extends beyond individual harm. Public health programs by definition are more likely to fail when stigma and fear are institutionalized. Transgender people are among the groups most at risk for ill health precisely because of discrimination and violence.
By prohibiting organizations, from local civil society groups to multilateral organizations like UNAIDS, from affirming transgender identities or addressing these underlying conditions, the expanded global gag rule actively undermines the foundations of effective public health programs.
Under the new and expanded gag rule, organizations face a terrible choice for accepting any U.S. funding. They can either self-censor and stop all work related to transgender people’s rights and needs. Or they forego U.S. funds and risk jeopardizing their organizational survival in an increasingly tough economic and funding climate.
This matters because civil society is one of the few effective counterweights to the global rise of populist and authoritarian governance. Alongside a coordinated global backlash against women’s and LGBT people’s rights are efforts to concentrate power, erode accountability, and close civic space.
Civil society organizations are crucial in exposing and resisting the authoritarian creep and in supporting marginalized groups. Gagging organizations into silence, or hollowing them out through funding cuts, accelerates civic space closure, and strengthens authoritarian governance.
Where the U.S. retreats and bullies, other countries and communities need to step up to offset the funding shortfalls and reduce organizations’ dependency on ideologically restricted U.S. foreign aid.
They need to support marginalized groups, increase funding for civil society groups, and commit funds to bolster multilateral mechanisms such as the Global Fund, which supports funding to combat HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria. They should clearly and consistently affirm everyone’s human rights, without exception.
Alex Muller is the director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Rights Program.
..
Renee Good. Alex Pretti.
During this last year, I wondered who would be the first U.S. citizen to be shot by our government. It was not a matter of if, but when. Always.
And now we know.
I thought it would be soldiers. But the masked men got there first. Because when you mix guns and protests, guns inevitably go off. The powers that be always knew it, hoped for it, and wanted it to happen.
Why? Because masked men and guns instill fear. And that’s the point. Ask yourself when’s the last time you saw masked men and guns in our cities, or anywhere for that matter. I always thought that men masked men with guns robbed banks. I was wrong.
Masked men want to rob us of our dignity as human beings. Of our assurance in the calmness and contentment of our communities. They want to rob us of our trust in our institutions, and our faith in each other. And truly they want to rob us of the happiness and joy that we all constantly yearn to find in our lives.
But our only collective ability as a nation to push back is our protests. Peaceful protests. As Renee and Alex did.
But peaceful protests? Because they are the perfect power to shame the cowardice of those that believe guns and force are the only true authority. Fortunately, our last hope and fiercest ally is our Constitution, which gives us the power — and the right — to protest.
How much more peaceful can you get when you hear Renee Good’s last words, “I’m not mad at you, Dude.” I may be mad at the system, the government, the powers of unknown people pulling the strings but not you personally. “Dude.” Peaceful to the last word.
Yet, what becomes lost in the frantic pace of hair-trigger news cycles, of officials declaring impetuous damnations alongside johnny-on-the spot podcasters spouting their split-second opinions are the two human beings who have lost their lives.
How habituated we’ve become as we instantly devour their instant obituaries. The sum of their lives declared in less than 10 seconds of cellphone video. They haven’t just lost their lives. They’ve lost all of their lives. And now we watch over and over again as their death is re-revealed, re-churned, re-evaluated, and re-consumed. In that endless repetition, we forget the meaning of life itself.
We must remember that Renee and Alex believed in their communities, in the purpose of their work, in the happiness of their loves and lives, and in the dignity and curiosity of life itself. They were singular individuals who did not deserve to die at the end of a gun barrel for any reason, ever.
How fitting that Renee was a poet. Sometimes in confronting the massiveness of loss in our lives, we look to our poetry and our psalms, our hymns and our lullabies, to find a moment of solace in our communal grief, and to remember Renee and Alex, for what they gave us in life.
Yet, at this moment, I cannot escape the reality of what was taken from them so soon, so violently and so forever. They were exceptionally courageous and normal people, and for that reason, I must remember them through a poem to explain to me, and others, the unexplainable.
I dream of this not happening.
I dream this day and night.
For none of this is real.
And none of this is right.
I dream of these sons and daughters
who now will not go home,
and dream of their mothers and fathers,
who now must stand alone.
I dream of all the flowers that they will never hold —
the kisses never shared again, the secrets to not be told.
I dream of all the sunsets that for them will never set,
I dream of all the love they gave and now they must forget.
I dream of all their dinners
with wine to never spill,
or books to read, or bread to break
or babies to be held.
I dream of each one still reaching
in the middle of the night,
for a hand that needs another
to stop a nightmare’s flight.
I dream of them not dreaming,
which I could never do,
for how can you not dream a dream
that never will come true.
I dream of this not happening.
I dream this day and night.
For none of this is real
And none of this is right.
Carew Papritz is the award-winning author of “The Legacy Letters,” who inspires kids to read through his “I Love to Read” and the “First-Ever Book Signing” YouTube series.
Opinions
Gay Treasury Secretary’s silence on LGBTQ issues shows he is scum
Scott Bessent is a betrayal to the community
We all know the felon in the White House is basically a POS. He is an evil, deranged, excuse for a man, out only for himself. But what is just as sad for me is the members of the LGBTQ community serving in his administration who are willing to stand by silently, while he screws the community in so many ways. The leader, with his silence on these issues, is the highest ranking “out” gay ever appointed to the Cabinet; the current secretary of the treasury, the scum who goes by the name, Scott Bessent.
Bessent has an interesting background based on his Wikipedia page. He is from South Carolina and is what I would call obscenely wealthy. According to his financial assets disclosure to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Bessent’s net worth was at least $521 million as of Dec. 28, 2024; his actual net worth is speculated to be around $600 million. He married John Freeman, a former New York City prosecutor, in 2011. They have two children, born through surrogacy. I often wonder why guys like Bessent conveniently forget how much they owe to the activists in the LGBTQ community who fought for the right for them to marry and have those children. Two additional interesting points in the Wikipedia post are Bessent reportedly has a close friendship with Donald Trump’s brother Robert, whose ex-wife, Blaine Trump, is the godmother of his daughter. The other is disgraced member of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Jenrette, is his uncle.
Bessent has stood silent during all the administrations attacks on the LGBTQ community. What does he fear? This administration has kicked members of the trans community out of the military. Those who bravely risked their lives for our country. The administration’s policies attacking them has literally put their lives in danger. This administration supports removing books about the LGBTQ community from libraries, and at one point even removed information from the Pentagon website on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, thinking it might refer to a gay person. It was actually named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets. That is how dumb they are. Bessent stood silent during WorldPride while countries around the world told their LGBTQ citizens to avoid coming to the United States, as it wouldn’t be safe for them, because of the felon’s policies.
Now the administration has desecrated the one national monument saluting the LGBTQ community, Stonewall, in New York City, by ordering the removal of the rainbow flag. The monument honors the people who get credit for beginning the fight for equality that now allows Bessent, and his husband and children, to live their lives to the fullest. That was before this administration he serves came into office. I hope his children will grow up understanding how disgusting their father’s lack of action was. That they learn the history of the LGBTQ community and understand the guts it took for a college student Zach Wahls, now running for the U.S. Senate from Iowa, to speak out for his “two moms” in the Iowa State Legislature in 2011, defending their right to marry.
Bessent is sadly representative of the slew of gays in the administration, all remaining silent on the attacks on the community. They are mostly members of the Log Cabin Republicans who have given up on their principles, if they ever had any, to be subservient to the felon, and the fascists around him, all for a job.
There are so many like them who supported the felon in the last election. Some who believed in Project 2025, others who didn’t bother to read it. Many continue to stand with him, with the sycophants in the Congress, and the incompetents and fascists in the administration, as they work to destroy our country and end the democracy that has served us so well for 250 years. To keep out all immigrants from a nation of immigrants. They all seem to forget it was immigrants who built our country, who fought against a king, and won. These sycophants now support the man who wants to be king. Who openly says, “I am president I can do anything only based on my own morality,” which history clearly shows us he has none.
I believe we will survive these horrendous times in American history. We have fought a king before and won. We have kept our country alive and thriving through a civil war. We the people will defeat the felon and his minions, along with the likes of those who stood by silently like Scott Bessent. They seem to forget “Silence = Death.”
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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