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Episode 50: Who Do You Love? · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hey listeners, I'm recording this intro from a beautiful cabana looking out over the Gulf of Mexico.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: If it sounds a little tinny, that's why.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Some of my biggest supporters are of that community and I think they, and I talk to them a lot about it.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've done really very well with that community and I just got a big endorsement from the Log Cabin Group.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you have ever attended one of former President Donald Trump's rallies, seen one on TV, or even just watched Fox News regularly, you may have seen people wearing t-shirts that have Gays for Trump written on the front.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Did you think they were planted by the campaign?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Or that any gay, lesbian, or transgender person who supported the current Republican Party was deluded or a simpleton?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be the first to confess that even as a historian who knows that ideology and identity do not map onto each other in obvious ways,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: I was stunned when I walked out of a Ben Shapiro keynote at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018 where the rabble-rousing reactionary journalist had rejected homophobia but embraced hatred of trans people.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Then I saw two women holding a trans flag that declared, we are trans and we are conservative.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: It was incredibly brave.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: But here's where I reveal my inner bitch queen.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: When I went downstairs to the exhibit hall and stumbled over a log cabin Republican's table staffed by two skinny, rumpled, nervous white men who were made even more anxious when approached by an obvious lesbian, my first thought was, what sad little queers they are.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, shame on me.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Those men had fought for that table at CPAC, a particularly difficult task since high-profile gay conservative influencer and youth organizer Milo Yiannopoulos had been disinvited the previous year for having shared fond memories of oral sex with a priest as an underage teen.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, Yiannopoulos is an exception to the history of LGBT people in the GOP
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: And not because he was and is so out of the closet, although now he says he's straight.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, queer Republicans have historically been the definition of rectitude and respectability.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: Men and women who often did come out in defense of their rights, to be free of state surveillance, to serve in the armed forces, to marry and to adopt children.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's still true today.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: And like other Republicans, LGBT conservatives are often business people who believe in individual freedom, family, low taxes, deregulation, God, and a strong national defense.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you go to the Log Cabin Republicans site today, you'll see a full-throated endorsement of these values, updated for the Trump era.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Listen to Charles Moran, a representative of Log Cabin Republicans, endorse Donald Trump on Fox News in 2019.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_03: I look at the question of is America better off now than it was four years ago?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: And is the LGBT community better off now than it was four years ago?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: And under President Trump, the answer is an arguably yes.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: President Trump was the first person elected to President of the United States who supported gay marriage and also has a background supporting equality issues as a businessman and as a philanthropist, but now also as President of the United States.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: We always try to follow the rule of trust but verify and looking at President Trump's appointments supporting you know appointing people in our organization taking meetings with our organization and just really advancing some of the big causes that are important to the LGBTQ community such as the elimination of HIV AIDS in 10 years or the decriminalization of homosexuality internationally these are really big issues that President Trump has stepped forward on and it heartens our organization to be able to support him
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, much of what Moran said was true in 2019.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Trump was in favor of same-sex marriage during the 2016 campaign, whereas both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before her were reluctant to challenge their political advisor's wisdom that it diminished their electability.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Listeners may recall that it was President Joe Biden, then Obama's vice president, who endorsed gay marriage in May 2012 on NBC's Meet the Press.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Who do you love?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Who do you love?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And will you be loyal to the person you love?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what people are finding out is what all marriages, they're ruder about.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Whether they're marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: The history of LGBT politics is complicated, to say the very least.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why I invited my fellow historian, journalist, podcaster, and friend Neil J. Young on the show to talk about his new book, Coming Out Republican, A History of the Gay Right.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: Now available from the University of Chicago Press.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: As Neil argues, battling detractors on their left and homophobia to their right, gay Republicans have nevertheless played power politics for over 80 years, sometimes in coalition with liberal groups and sometimes even founding advocacy organizations like One Ink that we think of as liberal in their origins.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: You're going to learn things in this episode that I didn't even know before I read Coming Out Republican.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Join Neil and me for this episode of Why Now?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: where history and politics meets the challenge of today.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm your host, Claire Potter, Professor of History Emeritus at the New School for Social Research, a contributing editor at Public Seminar, and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: This is Episode 50, Who Do You Love?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Neil Young, welcome to the show.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for having me.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: Great to be here.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: Your new book, Coming Out Republican, A History of the Gay Right, starts right after World War II and it ends almost in the present.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell our listeners the story this book tells?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I began 25 plus years before I thought I was going to begin this story, which would have been in the late 1970s when a lot of gay Republicans started organizing as out gay Republicans and creating their own grassroots organization.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: But I realized that I wanted to begin this story in the era of the Cold War and the lavender scare and the closet, essentially.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: And this story is one of a 70 plus year history of people on the right who identified mostly as gay men, although broadly speaking here of LGBTQ conservatives,
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: and the reasons why over those 70 years LGBTQ people identified with and fought for and advocated for the Republican Party.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: I used to teach LGBT history.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: I taught a whole survey and I never knew that it was conservatives and libertarians that started the first homophile organizations.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: So let's just start with what I didn't know because I don't think my audience is going to know that either.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this is one of the things I was fascinated to learn because the story that I think a lot of us have been told about those early homophile organizations is their communist associations and the visibility of people on the left who were founding members of them, including Harry Hay.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: But there were very important
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: LGBTQ are really gay male conservatives and libertarians who were in those founding moments, one of whom I write about a lot in this book Door Leg.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: And he was friends with some other libertarian men who believed that the pathway towards freedom and equality was through less government.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: And that they rightly understood the biggest oppressor of their lives was the federal government and that if they could restrain government power, they could be freer in their lives.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: And so that was very much at the heart of why they became involved in the homophile movement in the 1950s.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: So we have these kind of parallel stories that have never been brought together.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: And the story we normally tell is a civil rights story of lesbian and gay people who are inspired by the growing black civil rights movement and the black freedom struggle.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: But these guys you write about, many of them are libertarians.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: So can you tell our listeners what is a libertarian and how do they attach those politics
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: to the right to be free of police harassment?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: Well, particularly in the years that we're talking about here, the 1950s, the 1960s, and into the 1970s, the folks that I looked at, they would describe themselves as libertarians because they believed in a smaller government, one that had less power, that wasn't over-regulating business, and also wasn't over-regulating personal life.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_03: by which they meant specifically in their cases they wanted police to back away from surveilling them to tracking them down in public parks and in restaurants and bars to have a curtailment on police power and also these guys tended to be national security hawks which is sort of interesting
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: I interviewed Bettina Aptheker for the show and she of course has written about the homophobia of the Communist Party.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not as if there's an alternative left movement for homosexuals to go into where they're going to be welcome and that homophobia of the Communist Party bleeds into the new left.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of that has been written about.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not at all inconsistent to be conservative and gay and to be Republican and gay.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, there are a lot of liberals in the Republican Party, right?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I think this is one of the things that was really fascinating to explore through this history was to remember a Republican Party that looks a lot differently than it does today and to be in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, even into the 1980s, where you have a much
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: Who Do You Love?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: And at least more federal intervention in terms of civil rights.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: And some of these folks say, OK, this also should be how we as gay people gain rights.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so even when we talk about gay Republicans, there's a diversity of ideology.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's a sort of broader spectrum of politics, especially in the early decades of this book covers.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: There aren't a lot of transgender people who are visible at this time.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: But Reed Erickson is a transgender man.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: So as we move into the 1960s, Neil, and homosexuality is becoming more visible, a lot of these guys start becoming publicly activist, but others become involved in building what comes to be known as the new right.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: So can you talk about these parallel movements in the Republican Party?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things that really surprised me in researching this book was to discover how many closeted men were at the forefront of creating the modern conservative movement and were very closely aligned with and friends with William F. Buckley.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: That in fact he had a handful of gay closeted men around him when he was building the National Review, the American Conservative Union,
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: and other foundational institutions of modern conservatism.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: These folks tended to be East Coast guys, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_03: They lived in Washington, DC.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: They lived in New York.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: They kept a closeted life in a lot of ways to maintain their public image, their public profile.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them were married to women for a time.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of them had political ambitions in Washington, DC or career ambitions in which being out would have just
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: Who Do You Love?
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_03: Who Do You Love?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: To varying degrees, they were able to be much more out.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: And obviously, I think it probably goes without saying, California was much better on questions of homosexuality before most of the nation was.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: And so even in the 1960s and 1970s, it's an easier place to have some degree of outlife.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: But this is an ongoing theme of the book, sort of the closet and the out gay Republican and the way people move from one category to the next and back and forth again
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: Over the history that I'm covering but it was especially interesting in those early decades in the 1960s to see these two sets of actors here creating modern conservatism but in very different ways.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: That is interesting.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you really also point us to questions of place.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: I want our listeners to understand that LGBT history first emerged around the community study and looking at particular communities in which people organized.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things we know is that not just California, but Washington was very gay.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I wonder if you can talk about Washington as a setting in which these men could do their work but also have queer lives that were satisfying to them.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Washington, D.C.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: is where in a lot of ways we see at the ground level this history changing the most radically because in the 1950s and the 1960s, Washington, D.C.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: was considered the absolute worst place to be a gay person because of the power of the federal government and because of the
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: Huge focus of the federal government and all sorts of agencies in rooting out homosexuals and essentially destroying their lives, all in the name of anti-communism.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: We've seen this in the recent Showtime series, Fellow Travelers.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: But in the 1970s, for various reasons, Washington DC starts reforming itself.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: The local police decide that they aren't going to surveil
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: Who Do You Love?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: Who Do You Love?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: Of both parties, they had this shared understanding that no one would be outed, that you wouldn't sort of talk about someone you saw at a gay bar while you were in a meeting on Capitol Hill, because for all the ways that things had gotten better, it still could be really damaging to be found out to be a homosexual.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so a lot of the people I write about in this 1970s, they are living much more of this sort of divided life where it's a different divided life than one of the closet, right?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: But it's sort of one that has still this sense of public and private, and where you draw the lines of public and private is shifting.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_03: You have folks like Terry Dolan, who is one of the most important figures of modern conservatism in the late 1970s and early 80s, who is leading NCPAC and leading these conservative grassroots movements that are bringing millions of people into the Reagan fold, who's spending all his evenings at the gay bars.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: Who Do You Love?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: And they wed themselves to changing the Republican Party.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: They're actually saying we're going to take the Republican Party because these are our values and we are going to make gay liberation happen within it in a conservative way.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about that a little bit?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: Really into, I would say, the 1980s.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: There's not a lot of difference between the two parties when it comes to what we would identify as gay rights.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: Democratic Party starts changing a little bit in 1980.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: But as you say, these folks, especially in the 70s and 80s, they really believed
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: of how the party ought to operate, that this was consistent with individual rights and with freedom, and that gay rights was synonymous with these things, and that this was not controversial.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, as this is happening, there's this little movement called the religious right that is taking shape.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's a numbers game, right?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: However many gay Republicans, it's nothing compared to the tidal wave that it's forming, which we know to be the religious right.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about this moment when we're moving from Cold War to culture war, basically.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: So shifting from Cold War in the 1960s, beginning of the 1970s, the Vietnam War is ending.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're in this kind of liminal period where the new right is really beginning to form up specifically around the presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 76, which fails and then succeeds in 1980.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: But there's this period in which gay rights measures are succeeding in some places and then cultural conservatives move to reverse that.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: And we've got the Briggs Amendment in California and Anita Bryant's Save Our Children and that's in 77.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: So what's interesting to me about this is we have an organization that has sort of emerged called the Log Cabin Club that is partnering in some ways with liberal activists to try to make sure that these referenda fail.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, tell us about the Log Cabin Club.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_03: So the Log Cabin Republicans is the national organization that some of y'all may have heard of for gay Republicans.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: It begins in the late 1970s through all these local chapters, almost all of which began in California.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: And they're called things like the Log Cabin Club of Los Angeles, the Log Cabins
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: So these groups form in the late 1970s and, as you say, they partner with liberal gay organizations because they believe that this should be a bipartisan political effort by all gay persons in the state of California to defeat this state ballot initiative.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_03: And
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: This also was very much rooted in their philosophy of why they should begin these clubs to begin with.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: They thought that the best way to achieve gay rights was for gay rights not to be associated with one political party, but for it to be a non-partisan or at least a bipartisan issue.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: And so they thought, great, it's wonderful that all these gay democrat and gay liberal clubs exist,
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: We need to exist too so that we can show we as a people span the political spectrum.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_03: We're in both parties and both parties should be behind our basic civil rights.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that was sort of the founding philosophy and also the organizational strategy that you see in the late 1970s.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: That sort of vision doesn't hold for very long, but I think it makes a ton of sense when you think of where they were operating from in 1977 and 1978 and the different political terrain of the time.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and then we also have the first serious case challenging the expulsion of gays from the military in the Leonard Matlovich case.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: I did not know that Leonard Matlovich was a conservative.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell us a little bit about the Matlovich case and how that begins to help conservative Republicans cohere around a vision for their political future?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: So he's an absolutely fascinating man, an Air Force sergeant, a decorated Vietnam War veteran.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: And in the mid-1970s, he's on the cover of Time magazine declaring himself to be a gay man or a homosexual, as the headline said.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: And this launched him being kicked out of the military and also him suing to be reinstated.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: And this was a
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_03: Who Do You Love?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: and who is hugely important and so he's making a legal case in the courts right he's claiming a constitutional right to be able to serve but he's also making a public case which is about patriotism and duty and respectability and he was chosen for this reason he was this perfect
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: This is wild to see in the newspapers in 1976 and 1977, considering the general opinions about homosexuality at the time.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so one of the points I make is he is such an important figure in terms of shaping early ideas
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: In a way, he kind of leads the platform for what's going to be
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: The next stage, which is the fight for gay marriage, gay adoption during the AIDS crisis, where actually a lot of gay men end up adopting children who are orphaned by AIDS.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: That really sort of opens the door in that way.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so after Metlovich, we're going to see an increasing push toward the idea of legalizing gay families in the 80s and 90s.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about that trajectory within the Republican Party?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think one of the most important things that I really found fascinating to research and to write about and to think about was the intellectual case that gay conservatives made for same-sex marriage rights.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: and how early they were doing this.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: Like in the 1980s, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bauer, and other gay conservative Jonathan Rauch are arguing for same-sex marriage as a conservative proposition.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that this is sort of the basis of a domestic life that will bring stability, also security and safety to the nation.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: Now, why are those the ideas that are in play at this time?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: You have the HIV AIDS crisis happening and obviously ideas about homosexuals as a public health threat as vectors of disease you know and all the sort of ugliness of that is raging
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: And so these gay conservatives begin to advocate for same-sex marriage rights.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: And these are their words, right?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: To tame gay men, to domesticate us, to conquer this disease.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_03: And also we can make those same arguments to show that what we're after is not a radical remaking of society.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a liberal project.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: Among conservatives and especially not within the Republican Party.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: I do think it was an argument that was hugely impactful within the American public and especially on the left.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: If you look at public polling around same-sex marriage, I mean, into the 1990s, it's over 75%.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's even above 80% of Americans are opposed to gay marriage.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so the first effort was in bringing
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: Liberals and leftist center people into supporting same-sex marriage and I argue that it was these conservative arguments made by conservative gay men that actually moved the left on this issue.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, someone like Andrew Sullivan is also a Roman Catholic, I think.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so he was taking it from that perspective.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: We have all of these evangelicals and fundamentalists saying this is against God's law.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: And Sullivan, who is grounded in a religion that is arguably
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: Changeable over time and interpretable.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there are many different kinds of Catholicism.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Says, no, no, no, this is actually, this is what a good Catholic would do is have a monogamous marriage.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Except he then sort of changes his tune a little bit and says, actually, gay marriage is better because gay men know that it's really okay to go and have sex with other people and still maintain the purity of that commitment.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, his arguments shift here.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: He's not very consistent, which I think is really interesting when it comes to Sullivan because he tends to be someone who sort of holds to a position for good.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: But you see in his writings about marriage that a lot of the basis by which he's advocating for it
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: They Shift.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: In part, that's because he was really working this out in real time.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: I got to interview him.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_03: He was incredibly generous with his time, and he told me stories he had never told before, which I'm thrilled to get to include in the book.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: So in 1989, he writes this piece for the New Republic, which becomes a cover article, and it's called something like The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: And again, 1989, like this is shocking when we look at the history here.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: The reason that article came about, he was in graduate school at Harvard.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: He had started freelancing for the New Republic.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_03: He happened to be in Washington, D.C.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: on, I believe it was like his spring break.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_03: And Michael Kinsley, the editor of the New Republic, asked him to come by the office and to stick around for the staff meeting that week.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_03: There was a domestic rights case that had come up out of the state of New York around a same-sex couple and an apartment.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: I think with this issue, we're really seeing Sullivan work out in real time his thoughts about it in a way that I think is really fascinating and also one that I think mirrors a lot of Americans' minds in terms of this issue and how they thought about it over the years.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I think like many of the other political moments you point to in this book, there's this kind of parallel thing going on among liberals.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we're not even going to talk about the radical queers who are saying no one should get married.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: Marriage is like the worst interference of the state in your life.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: But I think our listeners are going to have to buy this book to find out what happens in the 1990s and the 2000s.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: But there's a notable absence of lesbians in it.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: How do you account for that?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was one of the things that sort of drove me the most crazy in doing this research because I wanted this to not be a story of just white gay men and unfortunately the historical record shows us that this history is one that is overwhelmingly a story and represented by white gay men and then I realized okay well that's actually the evidence and that's part of the argument here.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: Now, there have been really important lesbian Republicans and they figure throughout the book, you know, for the sort of small select moments that they appear.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I interviewed one, I reached out to a bunch of others.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of them were hesitant to speak to me.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't identify as Republicans anymore and they didn't want to even be on the record for this.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_03: It was an ongoing feature of these grassroots organizations that they were overwhelmingly male.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I get into that in the book and why that might have been the case.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, we don't have great polling around the LGBTQ vote.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: I would love a breakdown of this diverse demographic that we call the LGBTQ community so that we can better know the subcategories and how they add up.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: Because I think if we were to look at voting results, we would see larger lesbian representation on the Republican vote.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: But when it comes to these organizations and this history, they're barely visible.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so historian to historian, I'm going to propose something to you, which is a lot of women come into conservatism through motherhood and family and school and PTA.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: And there's this really prolonged period where women who come out as lesbians lose their children.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: Dan Rivers has written a wonderful book about this and so I guess one of the things I would posit is that because of business because of military service because of a range of institutions that are overwhelmingly male
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: And all of a sudden there's this turning point where her father and mother, who are the most conservative people in the world, are like, oh, no, no, no, no, Liz, that's not OK.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we've really gotten to a point where being queer in the Republican Party, on the one hand, we have a renewed culture war that can
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely, and you see this especially in conservative media.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: Fox News, there's a big number of LGBTQ conservatives who are talking heads on Fox News.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: And if you look at places like Breitbart or The Daily Wire or the broader universe of conservative media,
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_03: LGBTQ conservatives have had increasing prominence and visibility in the last decade and I think in some part it's sort of a component or just one of the sort of unique aspects of the Trump era and the bizarre politics and public imagery
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: Who Do You Love?
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: In a way, it keeps the culture war politics going.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: It just redirects the focus and it makes conservative white Republicans the victims, even as they represent a sort of anti-victim politics.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that that's been like a fascinating development to watch and one that really speaks to the complexity and the sort of internal inconsistencies in modern conservatism today.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, because we're in this moment when, in fact, broad swaths of the American public basically think lesbian and gay people are okay, we've also then taken a turn into the vilification of trans people.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm wondering, Neil, in this moment when we've been presented with a new problem of anti-trans politics,
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: and Censorship of LGBT Materials Even in Communities Where There Are Lots of Out LGBT People.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: Why should our listeners read this book now?
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think this book illuminates a longer history of the Republican Party that really hasn't been told.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_03: One that has a lot more complexity to it and a lot more diverse cast of characters.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: But I think especially as people seek to figure out where the Republican Party is headed,
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_03: and also who might be facilitating that course.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_03: This book provides some unexpected answers.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_03: It helps us understand that LGBTQ persons, especially gay men, have always been central to the development of the Republican Party since the mid-century to today.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: And understanding that helps us see this history very differently.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: It also helps us see this present moment really differently.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: This is one that LGBTQ persons have accommodated and have helped direct.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that this complicates our own sense of the Republican Party today, where politics are headed, but also of LGBTQ persons in this country.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_03: One of the reasons I wanted to write this was I thought there was an overwhelming narrative of
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast featuring Claire Potter titled Episode 50 Who Do You Love?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that's it for today's show.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 40:45
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• 40:49
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• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: Go to the Political Junkie Substack at clairepotter.substack.com for show notes, to listen to more episodes, or leave a comment.
• 41:02
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• 41:16
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• 41:21
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• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers to Political Junkie.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: Why Now?
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited and produced by me, Claire Potter.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: My opening theme is by Galaxy News and my closing theme is by Avocado Junkie.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's all for now.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: See you next time.