The Fruits of Rank

When Donald Trump reassumed the presidency in January, he brought with him a gaggle of gay courtiers who have rapidly become fixtures in Washington, D.C.’s conservative scene. According to breathless reporting from the New York Times, these “A-Gays” represent a “new power tribe” in Republican politics, ranging from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell to undersecretaries no one outside the capital has ever heard of. They are so ubiquitous that the twenty-four-year-old cohost of Steve Bannon’s podcast complained that her conservative friends struggle to get a date because “everybody’s freaking gay.”

A variety of reasons have drawn these men into the Republican orbit. One man, speaking to novelist Daniel Lefferts earlier this year, insisted that whereas Democrats are the “most killjoy people on earth,” Republicans are just more fun. Some feel that a Democratic Party bewitched by woke identity politics left them behind or that the tax-slashing priorities of the GOP are a better fit for their income bracket. Others credit Trump, a purported “camp icon” who courted gay voters from the start. In 2016, after a gunman attacked Pulse, an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, he told reporters that he was the community’s “real friend.” Less of a shift in ideology, this change can perhaps be chalked up to the personal preferences of the president, an inveterate New Yorker who has associated with countless gay men over the course of his career—not least among them his early mentor and noted sodomite Roy Cohn.

By the same token, however, it is patently untrue that the GOP has suddenly changed its stripes. Since January, Republicans have moved vigorously to restrict the rights of trans and gay Americans. The party’s platform endorses the “sanctity of marriage”—which many interpret as code for “one man and one woman”—and Republican politicians continue to advocate the repeal of marriage equality. In January, the Idaho House of Representatives endorsed a measure to overturn the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision granting marriage equality, and in August, Kim Davis, a disgruntled former county clerk, asked the justices to do just that. The defense secretary recently stripped the name of Harvey Milk, a veteran and gay rights pioneer, from a Navy vessel. The administration has likewise cut access to HIV medication and ended research into a vaccine for the deadly disease that, in the United States, has historically spread among gay men.

But ask one of the MAGA gays about any of this, and they’ll tell you that it’s all Democratic spin, that Trump loves his gay supporters, that they are living evidence that the Republican Party has reformed. They revel in their transgressiveness, challenging the Democrats’ grip on LGBTQ voters and the stale orthodoxies that they say have bound gay men to the left. It is indeed true that, when it comes to the politics of queer Americans, they are well out of the mainstream. Of the 8 percent of voters who self-identified as LGBT in a 2024 exit poll, 86 percent voted for Kamala Harris, a marked uptick from the still-impressive 64 percent of LGBT voters who pulled the lever for Joe Biden in 2020. But if we take a longer view, the history of powerful gay men reveals just how ordinary these MAGA mandarins are and how they may, as distressing as it sounds, be a harbinger of things to come.

The past is littered with powerful men who have flaunted their queer proclivities while serving governments that criminalized their very behavior. The most obvious case—which progressives today gleefully point to—are the gay National Socialists. Most prominent among them was Ernst Röhm, Adolf Hitler’s friend and the commander of the Nazi Stormtroopers who was publicly outed in 1932. Over dinner recently, a friend who served in the Biden administration sardonically asked, “How’d that turn out for him?” Not well! Röhm was murdered in 1934, the chief victim of the so-called Night of the Long Knives. The fascist regime turned decisively against male homosexuality shortly thereafter. Some fifty thousand men were imprisoned under Germany’s beefed-up sodomy laws and around ten thousand sent to concentration camps.

But even during the twelve years of Nazi rule—indisputably one of the most homophobic periods of modern history—well-connected queer people were still sometimes able to hide in plain sight. The famous actor Gustaf Gründgens, for one, made little secret of his homosexuality. Hitler himself complained that Gründgens, the director of the State Theater in Berlin, was too unmanly. Nonetheless, he remained a favorite of Hermann Göring, the regime’s second-in-command, and enjoyed a storied career during and after Nazi rule. Likewise, the well-known lesbian authors Ruth Roellig and Anna Elisabet Weirauch both joined the Reich Literary Association and continued to publish, despite living with their female partners.

The hypocrisy of earlier Republican administrations in the United States was little different. Although Ronald Reagan’s government made common cause with homophobic religious groups and ignored the AIDS epidemic decimating the country’s gay population, it was stuffed to the gills with men who seemed to live by the words “be gay, do crime.” Carl Channell, one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, was a closeted gay man, and his fundraising operation was known as the “Fruit Loop.” George W. Bush’s administration, too, had a closet full of gay aides who quietly went along with their president’s gay-bashing reelection strategy in 2004. Of course, Roy Cohn—who made his name as Joseph McCarthy’s chief lieutenant smearing political opponents as communist, gay, or both—was the godfather of the gay Republican, the hypocrite who pioneered the unholy alliance between well-heeled gay men and the conservative movement.  

What this hypocrisy shares, across time and space, is a dividing line drawn across class rather than sexual habit. “Homosexuals are men,” a fictional Roy Cohn explains in Tony Kusher’s Angels in America, “who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.” But “Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man”—he has clout, he has wealth and connections—“who fucks around with guys.” Just so.

Pre-modern eras show a similar pattern. In the seventeenth-century, for instance, Manchurian tribes swept down into China, establishing the Qing dynasty and promulgating a number of conservative laws regulating gender and sexuality. The new government’s ban on male same-sex relations, however, did little to stop the capital’s elite from patronizing the teenage boys who performed in the Beijing opera. Only when elites acted out of turn with their male lovers or prostitutes did the law come down on them, such as the case of Wudang’a. This eighteenth-century baron made no secret of his preference for men, but he was prosecuted only after he brazenly reported his erstwhile lover to the police as a runway slave.

Likewise, the sodomy laws that most European countries had promulgated by the late medieval period did little to stymie the desires of the continent’s rulers. In 1484, the Cologne city council got wind of a sodomitical underground and launched a sweeping investigation. When they discovered that the former ringleader of this group was a recently deceased council member, they hurriedly hushed the matter up. In seventeenth-century England, which had outlawed “buggery” in 1533, King James I was well known to take male lovers. It’s a pattern that repeats again and again: elites fuck who they want, regardless of what the law says. The MAGA gays are not particularly unusual, historically speaking, in voting according to the dictates of their pocketbooks. They belong to a long line of hypocritical men enjoying the fruits of rank.

What is unusual, however, is our widely held assumption that homosexuality entails progressive views. Although we take it for granted, the alliance between LGBTQ people and the political left is of recent vintage. A hundred years ago there was no such thing as the “gay vote.” Same-sex inclined men and women rarely saw their sexual proclivities as a factor, let alone a dispositive one, in who they selected at the ballot box. Harvey Milk, after all, was a Republican for a good deal of his life.

The association dates to the postwar era, and it was an intentional product of queer activism in Western Europe and the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, burgeoning gay and lesbian movements followed a two-step strategy: First, they urged same-sex-inclined men and women to identify with their sexual preferences—that is, to identify as gay or lesbian. Second, activists encouraged these men and women to start voting based on those sexual identities, typically pushing them toward progressive and liberal parties that were generally more amenable to LGBTQ rights. That is to say, right as gay and lesbian—and, to a lesser extent, trans—identities were going mainstream, so too were more and more queer people affiliating with left and center-left parties.

Center-left politicians’ embrace of the alternative movements of the 1960s and 1970s—think environmentalism or feminism—turbocharged queer voters’ leftward drift. These budding alliances brought more and more LGBTQ voters into center-left parties, such as the Democrats in the United States, Labor in the UK, and the Social Democratic and Green Parties in Germany. But they were always uneasy couplings. On the one hand, the kind of queer politics and identities embraced by these powerful parties was commercially defined and limited by the dictates of respectability and capital. The Democratic Party was never interested in winning the endorsement of queer sex workers but grew increasingly mesmerized by gay bankers and Hollywood producers. Over time, access to marriage and military service became the favored wedges with which to press for a narrow set of queer rights.

On the other hand, many activists continued to insist that such rights-based advocacy did little to change what they saw as a fundamentally unequal society. While marriage equality was a boon for wealthy gay men and lesbians in the mold of Edith Windsor, it did little for queer people on the factory floor. Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether this strategy was worth the sacrifice of abandoning more radical activism, but the early twenty-first century undoubtedly saw the height of this kind of political coordination. In the United States, LGBTQ voters have consistently preferred Democratic candidates by wide margins since at least Barack Obama’s presidency.

Yet, these two developments—the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity and their alignment with center-left parties—have started to pull apart in tandem. While a growing number of Americans identify as LGBTQ (as much as 30 percent of Gen Z adults, according to one recent poll), the specificity of identity has paradoxically started to lose its purchase. More and more young people are identifying as queer rather than gay or lesbian, seeing these identities as too rigid and narrow. Theirs is a world in which everyone—to a greater or lesser extent—is queer, an acknowledgement that the uniformity of identity does little to describe the diversity of individual sexual preferences and gender expressions.

As the specificity and cohesiveness of sexual identity disintegrates, it would make sense that its political staying power would begin to fade and new voting habits emerge. Indeed, across Western Europe, (white) gay men and lesbians have begun voting in greater numbers for right-wing and even far-right parties. In France, according to 2015 polling, the far-right National Front (now the National Rally) was more popular among married gay men than the rest of the population. The far-right Alternative for Germany likewise attracts many gay and lesbian voters and is led by Alice Weidel, a former Goldman Sachs banker who is married to a woman. In short, as sexual identity loses its staying power, queer people are increasingly voting according to the dictates of their race, class, or gender. No wonder that well-off white men are voting MAGA, regardless of who they fuck.

If the trend continues, it is likely we will see an increasingly fractured LGBTQ vote in the United States. We might be inclined to mourn the collapse of the alliance between queer voters and the center-left, but the progressive homosexual was never actually all that progressive. The queer rights movements of the late twentieth century often excluded our trans brothers and sisters and were frequently allied with the economic policies of the right. LGBTQ rights were, after all, won in an era of skyrocketing economic inequality, which Democratic politicians did nothing to address. Perhaps losing the crutch of sexual identity politics will force parties of the left to speak once more to the economic concerns of their constituents, building more robust coalitions of working class and middle-class voters that cut across differences of gender, sexuality, and race. If there’s a glimmer of hope to be found in the toasts of D.C.’s new gay elite, it is that their ascent may also sound the death knell for this unsatisfactory legacy of the twentieth-century left.