Log Cabin Republicans and the Gay Right

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

During the 1970s, in the wake of the Stonewall uprising, communities around the United States began to slowly and fairly quietly pass gay rights ordinances. By 1977, nearly 30 cities had some kind of gay rights legislation on the books. When Dade County Commissioners passed a law in 1977, banning housing and employment discrimination based on,  "affectional or sexual preference," it wasn't greeted with the same quiet acceptance that similar laws elsewhere were. Recording artist, Anita Bryant launched an ultimately successful campaign that she called, "Save Our Children," to repeal the law, making outrageous claims that gay people were trying to recruit children into homosexuality, and that granting them political rights was dangerous to the survival of traditional heterosexual families. Inspired by Bryant's success in repealing the Dade County Law in Florida, a conservative state legislator in California named John Briggs took to the steps of City Hall in San Francisco to announce a ballot initiative that would become California Proposition 6, more commonly known as the Briggs Initiative, that, if passed, would empower school boards to fire gay teachers based only on sexual orientation. The large gay population of California organized to fight back. The opposition included gay Republicans. On August 2, 1977, a group of Republicans, both gay and straight, met in San Francisco to strategize. However, it wasn't the first time that gay Republicans in San Francisco had organized. Earlier in 1977, Reverend Raymond Broshears had created the Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club, the country's first gay Republican Club, which prompted gay Republicans in San Diego and Los Angeles to form their own clubs. When Broshears distributed pamphlets at the California Republican state convention that argued that Republicans could not ignore the 2.5 million gay votes in California, the state GOP responded by naming six gay men to the Republican State Central Committee, which was more gay representation than the Democratic State Central Committee had at the time. Broshears though, was known to be disorganized and erratic, and some of the gay Republicans who had initially joined his San Francisco organization didn't appreciate his tyrannical leadership style, which was one of the reasons that they were meeting in August, 1977, without Broshears, to make a plan to fight Briggs. This new group called itself, "The Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights," and they held their first official meeting a week later at the PS Restaurant and Bar on Polk Street. The small group, 40% of whom were straight, received an official charter from the San Francisco County Republican Central Committee that September. Of course, the Republican Party in San Francisco had good reason to support them. Republican registration in the county was a dire 21%, and the gay population of San Francisco made up an estimated 13 to 26% of San Francisco residents. Gay Republican clubs in other parts of the state didn't receive such warm welcome from their local Republican committees. In Los Angeles, the Lincoln Republicans of Southern California, one of the groups inspired by Broshears, did not have the backing of the local GOP, and without a charter from the party, they had to drop Republican from their name, opting instead to be called the Log Cabin Club. Log Cabin was small, with only 29 members in 1979, notably, only one of which was a woman. Working together with Democrats, gay Republican groups started to sway public opinion against the Briggs Initiative. But it wasn't enough. However, a closeted gay man, who was a top aide to popular former California Governor Ronald Reagan, coordinated efforts to get this message to Reagan. And shortly before the election, Reagan came out against the Briggs Iitiative, saying that the initiative, "has the potential of infringing on basic rights of privacy and perhaps even constitutional rights." Surprisingly, given his later actions, including his inaction during the HIV AIDS crisis, Reagan went a step further in his opposition to Briggs, noting,  "Whatever it is, homosexuality is not a disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age, and that child's teachers do not really influence this." Reagan's endorsement tipped the scales, and Proposition 6, which had seemed poised to pass, was defeated by over a million votes, 58 to 42%. The California groups that had sprung up to defeat Briggs continued to meet after the defeat of the initiative, and in 1990, 10 gay Republican clubs, five in California, and others in Boston, Chicago, New York, Tampa, and Washington DC, joined together into an organization called the Log Cabin Federation. By 1992, the Federation had grown to 6000 members across 26 chapters. Republican President George HW Bush, who had signed the Ryan White CARE Act, to assist people with HIV AIDS, and who was the first president to welcome openly gay people to the White House, embraced the religious right in his reelection campaign, canceling meetings with the Log Cabin leaders, and he said that homosexuality, "in my view, is not normal." In response, Rich Tafel announced on CSPAN, "After deep reflection, the Log Cabin Federation has unanimously decided that it will not endorse George Bush." Log Cabin Republicans went on to endorse every Republican nominee for the next 24 years, with the exception of George W. Bush in 2004, when he, like his father before him, embraced the religious right in his reelection bid, calling for Congress to pass a federal marriage amendment. In 2016, Log Cabin withheld its support from Donald Trump, noting that while he often spoke positively about the LGBT community, he, "concurrently surrounded himself with senior advisors with a record of opposing LGBT equality, and committed himself to supporting legislation such as the so called First Amendment Defense Act, that Log Cabin Republicans opposes." In 2020, however, they changed their stance, endorsing Trump over a year before the election. As of this recording, Log Cabin hasn't yet announced whether they are endorsing Trump again in 2024, but former First Lady Melania Trump hosted a Log Cabin fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago on April 20, 2024. Joining me now to help us understand the longer history of gay Republicans is historian, writer and podcaster, Dr. Neil J. Young, author of, "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right."

Hi, Neil, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Neil J. Young  10:28  
Hi, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Kelly  10:31  
Yes, I love political history, anyway. So this was a great read, and I am super excited to discuss with you. So I want to start by asking, your earlier book was on the religious right. So how did you come to to write this book?

Dr. Neil J. Young  10:48  
Yeah, I have thought about this idea for actually over 20 years. It's sort of been one of those ideas at the back of my head as someone who began my career in academia and then left it, but who began as a historian of conservatism, I thought it would be a really interesting project to move from writing about the religious right and social conservatives to this sort of other side of conservatism, this this other faction within the Republican Party. There were two issues, though, that happened in 2019 that made that idea of the back of my head, come to the front and make me want to do this. The first was that Pete Buttigieg ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, now, obviously, not a gay Republican, but a man who is running as at the time a centrist Democrat, and who is getting really attacked from the left, and particularly from the LGBTQ activist community. And I thought, we need a much broader history of LGBTQ people that isn't just a history of progressive politics, that isn't just a history of liberal actors. So that was one thing. And the other thing, also in 2019, was the efforts both the Trump reelection campaign team and the Republican National Committee was doing to reach out to LGBTQ voters. I write about this in the book, I treat it very cynically, it should be said, and yet I also recognize that this was historically significant. First time ever, the RNC had appointed a person as outreach director to LGBTQ voters, the Trump team's work built on the stuff they've done in 2016. But this was, these were historic precedents that made me really want to, to understand better the history of gay Republicans and what it means for our moment.

Kelly  12:41  
So this is a fairly long history. You start early in the 20th century, and you know, as you said, go through sort of the current moment. Could you talk a little bit about your sources, what you were looking at, how you were pulling this story together? And I think I saw you did some oral histories as well. So could you talk about how, you know sort of how you took all of these things and put it into the story?

Dr. Neil J. Young  13:01  
Yeah, this is a, you know, a project that had me deep in the archives, which posed some challenges since the bulk of this was done during COVID. But fortunately, those archives opened up three really major ones, one of the one Institute here in Los Angeles at the University, University of Southern California, the LGBT Historical Society in San Francisco and the Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota. Those were collections that really contained most of the documentation of Log Cabin Republicans, which is the national, the largest, the oldest, the most prominent gay Republican organization. And the the archives had not only basically the entire documentary history of the national organization, but also of the grassroots organizations that ultimately formed the national organization in the 1990s. These grassroots organizations, these clubs, these local groups, began in the late 1970s, mostly in California. So all the their original paperwork, the meeting notes from the first or second time they ever convened, their newsletters, the correspondence of their members. I mean, I was actually blown away by how rich and deep these archives were. And I, you know, accompanied that with lots of newspaper and magazine articles. This was a phenomenon that has been really documented over time by journalists and by the media, and seeing its representation in media was really interesting to me. And then also I did almost three dozen interviews, mostly with gay Republicans themselves, but also with activists and people in the LGBTQ left, who had worked with gay Republicans, to help me understand a lot of the things that those documents didn't show me. I wanted this to be a character driven story that really was readable to a general audience. I wanted to tell a rich and compelling story. And as wonderful as those historical documents were, I really relied on my interviews to understand the scenes that, you know, so many of these events took place and to understand the emotions and the feelings and the and the conversations behind them, or that were part of them. And I'm really so grateful to all the people who participated, who allowed me to interview, because I really think that that just allowed this project to be so much different than say, my first book that had no interviews in it.

Kelly  15:33  
I think one of the things I want to make sure that we talked about is you've mentioned gay Republicans, and you talk in the book about the terminology that you're using. And of course, part of that is driven by the historical time periods you're looking at. But I think it's it's so striking so often in the book, how this is the story of white gay men. So could you talk a little bit about that? And you know, what, what you found as you were looking at this story, and you know, this isn't necessarily a story of a larger LGBTQ Republican group of people, in part because that doesn't exist. Right?

Dr. Neil J. Young  16:10  
Right. I mean, if we were to do a history of LGBTQ Republican voters, there would be different players here, there'd be different actors or the different representations. We know in any given election from polling that goes back to the early 90s at the national level, and actually polling that began in the 1980s at the state and local level, that anywhere from a quarter to a third of LGBTQ people vote Republican in national elections. At the state and local level, historically, we've seen those numbers as high as 50%. So we can trust that there is a wide and diverse representation within that LGBTQ voter who's not identified beyond that by pollsters. And I hope we will have much better polling in the future that helps us understand the breakdown of these subcategories. But I'm telling a history about the gay Republican organizations, mostly Log Cabin, but other right of center gay organizations, and also of the public faces and figureheads of this movement, and they are overwhelmingly white gay men. Now, this was really frustrating to me when I started out because I thought it was my duty to find, you know, lesbians and persons of color and to make sure that I wasn't just writing a story of one gay man after another. And yet, the historical evidence speaks for itself. And I realized after a while, oh, wait, this evidence is actually essential to the argument that I need to make here, which is that this is a politics of maleness, of whiteness, of heteronormativity, or homonormativity, of a sort of conservative presentation aesthetically and personally. And if I could really reckon with what it means to write about gay Republicans, even as I continually nod to a broader LGBTQ right demographic, I can make a really sharp argument about what this politics has meant and what it represents within a larger realm of American conservatism.

Kelly  18:14  
And so part of what is important about that presentation, is that what civil rights means, what civil rights are to a population who can hide their minority status if and when they want to, seems to be very different than the civil rights of African Americans or, you know, other people who can't hide their status? Could you talk a little bit about that, because that seems to play often into what is happening in the story?

Dr. Neil J. Young  18:45  
It's such a good question. And it was one of the you know, one of the really fascinating things, for me to sort of trace throughout this project was the different discourses that gay Republicans called upon, the different words they used and what those meant in different eras and also how they position them differently than maybe their dominant use of usage in a moment. So civil rights is a really interesting one, because on one hand, you have a lot of these gay Republicans in the 1970s, who are the guys who are starting these first gay Republican clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles and other parts of California. They are speaking very much in the language of civil rights. On one hand, it's not surprising they're doing so given they're you know, less than a decade out of the civil rights movement. They're really that's a reference point for them of sort of these other movements have happened, movements for Black equality, the women's rights movement. We are the next movement, the gay rights movement is attaching itself to the civil rights movement. And so they are sort of using a language and a discourse of civil rights. They also believe that this is a Republican philosophy. They say, "We're the party of Lincoln." So that's why they're named Log Cabin Republicans, for those who may wonder. It's a reference to Lincoln's birthplace, and they have this conception of themselves as the truest heirs of the Republican tradition, where we are the ones who, really through our own lives and the politics we represent, we represent the party's founding beliefs and equality, liberty, freedom, of civil rights. But the way they imagined civil rights is very narrow, it's not expansive. It's a sort of way to justify themselves and to speak about themselves, but not to advocate for a broader political rights based even vision. And one of the things I write about a lot, which is sort of related to this is like what gay rights means to these folks. And they have a lot of different views of that, you know, some of them don't even believe in the notion of gay rights. They just want a Republican party or a federal government that doesn't actively discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation; but they're not, you know, in their, in their words, asking for special rights. Others say, "Well, we want we mean, gay rights to mean just these handful of things. Let us serve in the military, let us get married, let us have basic employment protections. And that's it." And that was a really fascinating debate to watch play out over time within this movement, and also how they sort of shifted their language use around gay rights, especially once we get to sort of an era in which people are talking more about LGBTQ rights.

Kelly  21:33  
You've mentioned a couple of times, California and LA and San Francisco being important epicenters to this. You know, I think a lot of people probably think about California as a center of liberal LGBTQ activism and probably not conservative, gay activism. Could you talk a little bit about that? Why California is so important how it plays into this story. And there are swings in California, overall, the politics of California and how people are viewing things like gay rights.

Dr. Neil J. Young  22:06  
Yeah, I think it may be fascinating and even surprising for people to learn that the first gay Republican club is founded in San Francisco actually, the first two. There's two that sort of compete for a time and one of them lasts, and I think probably people don't think of the Bay Area's like the birthplace of any Republican movement, although I suppose if it's going to be one Republican movement, it's going to be gay Republicanism. California is a fascinating place for me to write about, first of all, I live in Los Angeles, but I just moved here. I moved here at the beginning of the pandemic, when I was starting this project, and so to immerse myself in this state's history, and to really think about what it meant to have all these different actors in northern and southern California at this time, creating these clubs was fascinating. I think, especially these early folks, they really imagined themselves, they saw themselves as libertarians. And I think that libertarianism fits very neatly within a western form of Republicanism that's very prominent in California, in the second half of the 20th century, particularly in these decades that we're talking about. You move out here, from other parts of the country, like so many of these guys were transplants as so many Californians who are in general, they were tired of overregulation in the northeast, or feeling like the federal government was overbearing on them. And they'd come out here out west to this land of opportunity and freedom, of tolerance, a place where they could live and let live, and where their ideas about freedom fit within a broad abroad Republican Party that was quite powerful in California, although that was really shifting through these decades. The Republican Party in California is in a period of decline in a lot of the decades I'm writing about. And so a lot of these gay Republicans were making the argument to party officials, "We are we are the best face of this party. We can reach moderate voters. We can bring independents over to us. We can represent a sort of hopeful, optimistic Republicanism that will work with more of California's voters." And they continue to make that argument through these decades, but particularly in the 70s and 80s, when they're first forming.

Kelly  24:23  
One of the more unexpected things in the book for me was seeing Harvey Milk actually saying, "Yes, gay Republicans, you know, should be organizing." Could you talk a little bit about that? 

Dr. Neil J. Young  24:33  
Yeah. I mean, I have to say this book had so many surprises for me in the research, which is always just the most wonderful part about getting to do this stuff. But to find out that Harvey Milk was not only a huge supporter of the gay Republicans who were organizing in San Francisco, but that he was actually at the first meeting of the organization called Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, which is now known as Log Cabin Republicans of San Francisco, and is, as it continues to exist to this day, the oldest gay Republican organization. Harvey Milk was a Democrat, as we all know, a liberal Democrat who wins office in San Francisco. But he started off in his earlier life as a banker in New York, a Goldwater guy, he was a Republican conservative. He used to wake up in the morning in the 1964 campaign, and take the subway and pass out Goldwater pamphlets to passengers on the New York City Subway. When he moves up to San Francisco, he changes his politics. But he still believes that this is a city that has all sorts of different gay people from across the political spectrum. And he believes deeply that the pathway towards freedom and the pathway towards greater visibility and the securing of rights is a bipartisan one, that we need the gay people in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to make this a bipartisan issue and also to ensure that it's not used by one party against another, that it doesn't become, you know, this thing that that's controversial, and that people are using to, to harm LGBTQ people or to, to work against gay rights. And so he is very supportive of the folks who are organizing this gay Republican club in San Francisco. He's at that original meeting, and he continues to give his backing of it. And it should also be said that that first club meeting and the club, for the first couple of years was not just gay Republicans. It was gay Republicans and heterosexual Republicans in San Francisco, including a bunch of married couples, who believed that the Republican Party should stand for gay rights. All those heterosexual members end up leaving in a couple of years for a number of reasons. But there's a sort of a broad and diverse community that started in these first clubs, that includes you know, even a Democrat like Harvey Milk. 

Kelly  27:00  
And it's perhaps worth noting here that it was well into the 21st century before the Democratic Party actually made any significant strides in being better for LGBTQ rights, however, we're going to define that then the Republican Party. So that is not the case in this time period we're talking about, like the beginning of these clubs. 

Dr. Neil J. Young  27:22  
Absolutely. And so many of the gay Republicans were saying, and they were right about this, like, "The Democrats aren't all that better on these issues than the Republican Party is. So if we believe in these other principles of conservatism or Republicanism, then we should stay in this party, and we should make it into a gay friendly organization, and you folks on the left should do as well, with the Democratic Party." Now, that argument becomes more and more difficult over time. But for much of the period I'm talking about, it actually makes a lot of sense. And I think that was one of the things I really had to make sure I communicated through the course of the book, was the sort of different portrait of the Democratic Party than I think people might have, if they're just sitting from the vantage point of today, and assuming that this has always been the case. And I think, you know, that was that was a recurring argument gay Republicans made through the years.

Kelly  28:22  
So like any story of gay life in America, there's a fairly sharp dividing point in the 80s, with the rise of the AIDS crisis. Could you talk about how that affected this particular group, the gay Republicans, how they're thinking about this crisis and the response, or in many cases, lack of response from the government?

Dr. Neil J. Young  28:44  
Yeah, this was a fascinating period to research and to think about. It's the center of the book. There's sort of a before and after. And in one part, that's because, not surprisingly, this epidemic is devastating for the gay Republican clubs, especially the ones in California. Dozens of the members of the different groups in California are killed by HIV AIDS. And so the numbers plummet, the people who come after, in the 90s and following are really sort of a different set of folks that have different life experiences that forms a sort of different politics. But this is like a dividing line in this moment in history, in large part because of just the huge decimation that makes of these clubs and what they have to rebuild from. But before we get to that point, it was really fascinating to see the way that particularly the San Francisco club, Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, how it dealt with the HIV AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, which for much of the 80s was the epicenter of the health crisis. And in the early 1980s, as people are just really learning about the disease, coming to recognize that the concerned Republicans was actually the first gay organization in San Francisco, that held a fundraiser, to raise money to give towards HIV research at the time. And when a lot of other gay groups and clubs are sort of putting their head in the sand, didn't really want to deal with this at first, they started bringing in epidemiologists, one of whom was actually a member of very prominent epidemiologist at UC San Francisco was a member of their organization. And he gave this really impactful talk to the club early in the 80s, about what they knew at that time of the disease. And the club decided that it needed to do a couple of things, one that it needed to be the voice to the Republican Party in the state of California, on the issue of HIV AIDS. There was a Republican governor in office who they had helped elect and who they had pretty friendly relations with. And they wrote lots of white papers that were sent to him and his administration, some of them ended up getting appointed to his his administration, including who he chooses to lead his sort of HIV AIDS department. But also, and this was the part that I found most fascinating to research and to write about, the gay Republicans in San Francisco organized against against the shutdown of the bath houses in the city. In the mid 80s, the San Francisco Public Health Department shuttered all the gay bathhouses and sex clubs, and gay Republicans, and they're not alone in this, I mean, probably the sort of wide swath of, of gay persons in San Francisco were opposed to this. But what I found really interesting was the way in which gay Republicans approached this issue. You know, folks on the left are arguing about sexual freedom, and about government repression, and homophobia, you know, even of these democratic officials who are doing this. Gay Republicans are making a different argument, one that really is articulated through a conservative discourse, and also one that's very partisan. So they're saying they're not talking about sexual freedom, as much as they're talking about individual freedom, personal responsibility. "I should be able to assess the risk for myself and I can individually decide what I want to do with my body." This is an interesting argument to make in the 1980s, as other things are happening in the Republican Party around the politics of the body. And also, government should not interfere in private enterprise, it is wrong of the government to go in and just shut down businesses. This is government overreach is democratic oppression of, you know, freedom of business of personal choice. And that's the argument they're making through the 80s. And actually, the the president of Concerned Republicans at the time is this man named Duke Armstrong, who's also a lawyer, and he represents several of the bath houses in this class action lawsuit against the city which they win, or at least a judge sort of overrules turns over the the city decree. So they win this sort of decision about the bathhouses. But by the late 80s, as AIDS become so decimating and devastating, they really started start to change their what they're talk talking about when it comes to personal freedom, and, and sexual freedom. They become much more conservative, and this is when you start to see them advocating for things like same sex marriage as something that will domesticate and curtail homosexual promiscuity. Like these are the ways they're talking. And so it was such an interesting about face in such a short period of time to see them go from, you know, defending the bathhouses and sexual freedom, even if not using that language to advocating in just a couple of years, "We need to get same sex marriage legalized, so gay men will behave themselves and we can stop the virus this way."

Kelly  34:02  
It's fascinating to read in the wake of COVID, and about stay at home orders and mask mandates and stuff. Yeah. So I want to turn to same sex marriage. Because, you know, as you mentioned earlier, this is one of the very few things sort of gay rights things that most gay Republicans are not all but most are advocating for. And marriage, of course, is a very conservative institution at heart. And so this makes a certain amount of sense. Could you talk about that, that long fight that sort of ended very suddenly when the Supreme Court made its its decision and how this is really one of the places that there is bipartisan efforts that gay Republicans, gay Democrats, you know, can come together and maybe have similar ideas or for very different reasons or you know, trying to do it differently but can be working toward the same kind of goal.

Dr. Neil J. Young  34:58  
Yeah, This was such a interesting thing to, to research and to write about. And it really formed, you know, a huge arc of the book, because it's such a long history here. And it was one that I, you know, sort of knew about as a gay man and someone who is, you know, somewhat involved in the movement for marriage equality, in the last decade or so. I was generally aware that gay Republicans, gay conservatives had been important in that history. I didn't realize the extent to which we really owe them a lot of credit, especially in the early years for moving this forward. In 1989, Andrew Sullivan, who is, you know, incredibly prominent right of center, gay man writes a cover piece for the New Republic, called, "Here Comes the Groom: A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage." 1989. Public polling in the 80s, and into actually the late 90s, showed that less than a third of Americans, so a lot of Democrats here, a lot of independents here, did not believe that same sex marriage should be made legal. And in 1989, he was making in a very long piece, a conservative argument for the legalization of same sex marriage. And, you know, part of his argument is what I just sort of mentioned, as it relates to the HIV AIDS crisis, that this is a good stabilizing, domesticating institution that will curb human behavior, that will help public health, that will increase public health, it will increase national stability, and security. I mean, he's making those sorts of arguments, and also, that marriage is a conservative institution, and that by more people joining it, this actually strengthens the institution, because it expands it, it brings more people into it. The radical thing would be to argue against marriage, to say that it didn't matter, to support policies, or even cultural arguments that weakened a belief in marriage. But if we are bringing more people into it, this is shoring up its strength. And it's sort of its central purpose of a as a pillar of, you know, society. And this argument is really interesting, because I believe, especially in the first decade or so, it was most effective, not on the right, but with the left. So many LGBTQ persons didn't believe that marriage was something that the movement should be fighting for, they thought it was patriarchal, that it was conservative that it was something heterosexuals did. And that that was not a liberatory act to advocate for gay persons entering into such a conservative institution. So a lot of this work is in sort of bringing the LGBTQ rights movement into position of supporting same sex marriage; but also this is about reaching a broader American public, about reaching Democrats, about reaching independents, center of the aisle type folks to start changing their minds, to start building public support for this that really takes a long time to happen. And I interviewed Evan Wolfson, who is a gay liberal, who was the probably the most important figure, certainly one of the most important figures in bringing about same sex marriage, ran a national organization devoted to this. And he told me, he worked very closely with Sullivan, and with Log Cabin folks, and with other right of center, gay and lesbian advocates of same sex marriage. And he said, the thing that they gave us was a vocabulary, a way of speaking to Americans who don't identify as liberal or progressive, who are moderates, who are independents, who are conservative Democrats, who needed the conservative discourse that gay Republicans were providing around marriage in order to start to understand this in order to start sort of signing on to it. And so that sort of answer that speaks to the intellectual foundations that I think gay Republicans providing gay conservatives provided. And then there's also you know, political efforts that are really central to once this starts becoming like a state issue, and also once it starts getting taken up by courts, where were they're important players as well.

Kelly  39:30  
I almost don't want to ask about this because it was the part of the book that was most upsetting to me. But toward the end of the book, you talk about a openly gay, white nationalist, there are several of them that you talk about in the book. Could you talk a little bit about how how we've gotten to a point where these adamantly white nationalist people who are supporting the Proud Boys can be openly gay and not see you not get any pushback from the other white nationalists about that, not see any problem in their own minds about how that might be?

Dr. Neil J. Young  40:04  
Yeah. This was a wild thing for me to look into, really hard to wrap my head around, and yet so important because these folks are more numerous than I expected and more influential, especially on social media, especially in social media. You have these handful of guys who are white nationalist, white supremacist, and they are gay, although they don't call themselves gay, they have different names for themselves, one of the ones they like is homophile. And they start making an argument that actually gets adopted by a much broader LGBTQ conservative demographic that isn't, you know, of the white nationalist sort. But they start arguing that they're not going to use the word gay, and certainly not the LGBTQ name, because those are political identities. And so they call themselves homophiles, or men- loving men, because that speaks to like, their discreet sexual identity. The thing that's really at the heart of this is a patriarchal assertion of how society should run and also a racist one. They are arguing that there is a natural order to society, and that it is one in which men dominate everything, and also that there's a racial hierarchy. And that, you know, of course, the white people are at the top of that, and not only that, they are at the top of it, that is in their duty to suppress others, because any sort of movement, any sort of any sort of developments that challenge white supremacy or male supremacy, are at the heart of like, every civilization that's fallen. I mean, this is very, it's, it's, it's wild, they they are constantly tying themselves back to the ancient Greeks. You know, it's a various sort of, quote, unquote, Western civilization argument they're making, but one that shores up patriarchal dominance, and that really, really is misogynistic. I think that's actually the most important part. It's such a disgusting treatment of women, but through a very particular homosexual articulation of that. And so you think, "Well, why would all these white nationalist, heterosexual guys want to line up with these folks?" But when the misogyny is so front and center, that's the way that I think this association is made. And, you know, one of them makes this argument, like, men should be separate, like women should be on the side of everything, certainly shouldn't be at the center of politics. But they should be off taking care of babies, taking care of food, that men need to be around other men. And there's a sort of like homosocial vision here, in which both heterosexual and homosexual men are men together. And some of you are gonna, most of you are going to want to go have sex with women in any way you want to do that. And some of us are gonna want to have sex with each other. But what we are showing together is that we as men dominate, and we do so violently. And so it was wild to go into that world. I mean, this is huge on the white nationalist websites. It's amazing how many gay white men are writing for these websites and are featured prominently at their conferences and, and the sort of way in which they are upholding and advancing a misogynistic, racist vision of society that we also know is being increasingly mainstreamed beyond just the sort of fringe this this fringe community where it may have originated.

Kelly  43:48  
Well, I have a million more questions I could ask, but that would take all day. So I am instead going to encourage people to go read this book. It's incredible. I loved it. Can you tell people how they can get a copy? 

Dr. Neil J. Young  44:00  
Oh, thank you so much. It's available everywhere, on bookshelves, Amazon, independent booksellers, and it's called again, "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right" from the University of Chicago Press. Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful to talk with you. And I appreciate all your questions.

Kelly  44:17  
Yes, of course, there's going to be an audiobook too, right? 

Dr. Neil J. Young  44:20  
There is, read by yours truly. So if you couldn't get enough, you can listen to me for several hours. I'm a little bit nervous to hear it when it comes out. But yours truly. I'm the one narrating it.

Kelly  44:32  
Well Neil, thank you so much. This was a great book and I've really enjoyed speaking with you.

Dr. Neil J. Young  44:36  
Thank you again, I loved it

Teddy  44:55  
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