Last week, the Trump campaign released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees that LGBTQ advocacy groups identified as alarming and terrifying for LGBTQ rights.
These overtures mark a noteworthy departure from past GOP demonization of LGBTQ Americans. Yet, those tactics haven’t made the GOP anathema to all LGBTQ voters. Since the 1970s, gay Americans have routinely given the GOP as much as a quarter of their vote in presidential elections, even as religious conservatives came to dominate the Republican Party and actively opposed their fundamental rights. LGBTQ conservatives have also consistently organized on behalf of the GOP and worked to forge a place for themselves in the party, which shares their views on economic and national security issues. In response to critics, they point to these shared values and argue that only by working from within can they change the party.
But rather than a culmination of their hopes, Trump’s outreach may simply be empty rhetoric designed to mask quiet efforts to roll back numerous LGBTQ rights and court moderate suburbanites he must win but who are uncomfortable with his attacks on minority groups. Instead of a new direction for the GOP, Trump’s approach may only differ rhetorically from traditional GOP tactics.
In the early 1970s, LGBTQ Republicans in California began to organize for the first time in small groups, such as San Francisco’s Gay Voters League and San Diego’s Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club, in the hopes of pushing the party in a libertarian — and sometimes liberal — direction. They also wanted to make sure those who shared their sexual orientation but were far to their left politically did not speak for the entire LGBTQ community. Yet, their biggest motivator came from the emerging religious right.
“Gay Republicans are beginning to come out of the woodwork,” Dorr Legg, a leader in the Lincoln Republicans of Southern California group, told the Bay Area Reporter in the spring of 1978. The cause? The Briggs Amendment in California, a 1978 ballot initiative that would have made it illegal for any gay man or woman to teach in the state’s public school system.
Across California, newly formed Lincoln Clubs coordinated the fight to keep bigotry out of their party and defeat the amendment. In other places, such as Houston, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, D.C., gay Republicans founded grass-roots groups to oppose anti-gay efforts in their communities.
With the defeat of the Briggs Initiative and a growing network of organizations across the country, gay Republicans felt optimistic as the 1980s began. The new president, Ronald Reagan, had provided a critical voice against the Briggs Initiative, and gay Republicans hoped he would promote their version of the Republican Party. “Individual rights has long been a hallmark of conservative philosophy, and with a little nudge from us, the new administration will quietly honor its commitment to that principle,” Duke Armstrong, a gay Republican activist in San Francisco, argued shortly after the election. Gay Republicans also had hope because some Republican politicians, notably San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock, and George Deukmejian, who was elected governor of California in 1982, had actively courted gay voters to win office.
But White evangelicals were fast becoming the GOP base. As the HIV/AIDS crisis took hold, conservative religious activists targeted gays as the greatest threat to the nation’s well-being, an especially useful new enemy to replace the right’s long-standing fears of communism as the Soviet Union began to crumble.
Republican politicians fell in line with this anti-gay emphasis. Reagan’s rhetoric grew increasingly hostile, promising his administration would “resist the efforts of some to obtain government endorsement of homosexuality.” In California, the onetime pro-gay Gov. Deukmejian quickly changed course, vetoing a nondiscrimination bill and endorsing an unsuccessful ballot proposal requiring mandatory reporting of AIDS exposure.
Religious right leaders, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, provoked the GOP’s anti-gay turn. Even in states far from the Bible Belt, like California, Oregon and Alaska, Republican officials realized opposing gay rights was necessary to stay in power as religious conservatives became formidable voting blocs and took control of their state GOP organizations.
But gay Republicans — such as Bob Roehr, president of Washington’s Capital Area Republicans, Gary van Ooteghem, who led Houston’s chapter of the Texas Log Cabin Republicans, and Tim Drake, who helped found the Chicago Area Republican Gay Organization — stubbornly refused to give up their party without a fight. They insisted that they, rather than religious conservatives, represented the GOP’s true philosophy of liberty, individual rights and a small federal government. While the religious right sought to harness federal power to regulate and even criminalize Americans’ private lives, gay Republicans countered that their goal was a constrained federal government that would stay out of both their wallets and their bedrooms.
“I agree with the Republican position on the economy, and I agree with their defense policies,” Drake told the Washington Blade in 1980. “It’s their social issues stand I have trouble with.”
This sense explained why LGBTQ Republicans — who were overwhelmingly middle- and upper-class, White men — remained loyal to their party, even as it advocated for same-sex marriage bans and other limitations on LGBTQ rights through the 1990s and early 2000s. They emphasized their support for the GOP’s commitment to low taxes, deregulation and a strong national defense, and many even said their sexual identity ranked secondary to their political convictions. “We gay Republicans tend to be entrepreneurs and homeowners,” New Orleans attorney John Rawls said about his comrades in 1988.
Yet even as foot soldiers for the Republican Party, they enjoyed little welcome and were almost never courted by the national party. With some 40 million evangelical votes on the line compared to only a couple million openly gay voters, the political calculus looked obvious to most Republicans.
But with the Supreme Court’s legalization of LGBTQ marriage and the sea change in public opinion on LGBTQ rights over the past decade, conservatives increasingly turned their animus toward immigrants and Muslims.
Trump’s rise both facilitated and exploited this development. His New York background and socially liberal — and libertine — reputation made Trump seem like the right person to usher in a new era in LGBTQ-GOP relations. In fact, in 2011, it was the LGBTQ Republican group, GOProud, that invited Trump to address the influential Conservative Political Action Committee meeting. The occasion marked not only Trump’s first appearance at CPAC, but also GOProud’s. Never before had an LGBTQ organization been allowed to attend the event.
On the presidential campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, Trump made history by directly appealing to LGBTQ voters. At a Colorado rally, he waved a gay pride flag from the stage. Elsewhere, he promised he would be a “better friend” to LGBTQ Americans than Hillary Clinton, and he later became the first Republican nominee to say “LGBT” in an acceptance speech.
But this mention showed both how much — and how little — the GOP had changed. Noting the recent Pulse nightclub massacre, Trump vowed he would “protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign identity.” The Cleveland crowd roared approvingly, a significant change from prior conventions, like 1992, where delegates had cheered anti-gay rhetoric. But Trump’s speech had not celebrated LGBTQ Americans so much as it invoked them to justify his extreme anti-immigration, anti-Muslim agenda. The 2016 Republican platform outlined the party’s ongoing total opposition to LGBTQ rights.
LGBTQ voters understood this reality, giving Trump only 14 percent of their vote, the lowest figure for a Republican presidential candidate since 1992.
Trump’s presidency has continued such contradictions. While frequently highlighting its LGBTQ appointees — such as Patrick Bumatay, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit; Tyler Goodspeed, acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers; and five U.S. ambassadors, including Grenell — the Trump administration has waged a steady assault on LGBTQ rights behind the scenes, especially on transgender issues. In touting Trump’s record, Log Cabin Republicans and other pro-Trump LGBTQ people have embraced the very tokenist politics they long accused Democrats of offering while enabling the forces of intolerance that still target LGBTQ Americans.
No doubt, many LGBTQ Americans appreciate Trump’s Republican Party isn’t stoking homophobia to the extent it once did. But LGBTQ Republicans’ willingness to provide cover for what remains a thoroughly anti-LGBTQ administration may prove far more destructive in the long run.