The Libertarian History of the LGBTQ Movement

You write that gay Republicans found the sense of determination, confidence, and entitlement for their activism because they were often White cisgender men. How do you see that thread continuing today?

I believed I was writing a history of LGBTQ conservatives, but the historical evidence showed me that it was a history of gay Republicans. People of color and women were rare, individual figures. These groups were 90 to 100 percent White gay men and would occasionally say we need to diversify our membership or we need to recruit women and persons of color to join. But those statements never developed into anything substantive. Therefore, this is a history of Whiteness, maleness, patriarchy, and capitalism.

[Their race and gender] allowed them to make inroads into the Republican Party, as heteronormative, straight-acting, suit-wearing business types. They didn’t really question gender and sexuality politics they thought didn’t affect them. Even now, if you look at the Log Cabin Republicans website, their board leadership is [almost entirely] male.

They’ve had some high-profile women involved in recent years, but many left—they were the never-Trumpers. They have had internal debates about referring to themselves as an “LGBT” Republican organization. They don’t use the “Q” because they say queer is a political identity of the Left, not a sexual identity. There also have been debates over whether to include trans people and the politics they advocate. That is all indicative of the organization’s Whiteness and maleness.

Your book also discusses a very different gay Republicanism in the 1970s versus the Reagan era. How and why did that shift happen?

The 1970s gay Republicanism fit the times, a sort of California-style Western libertarianism. They were often small business owners with a politics of stay out of my wallet and stay out of my bedroom. These groups emerged in response to the Briggs initiative, a 1978 California state ballot proposition that, had it passed, would have made it illegal for any gay person to work in the state’s public school system. They organized grassroots groups in San Francisco and Los Angeles that ultimately became the Log Cabin Republican organization. They came out of the closet and had this philosophy: We are the real Republicans, and this is our political party. Who are these Bible beaters that are trying to come into our GOP and impose morality on us? Obviously, gay Republicans were on the losing side of that political struggle.

Under Reagan, Gay Republicans accommodated themselves to the party’s cultural and religious conservatism. An increasingly socially conservative gay Republican politics emerged in the late 1980s as a response to the Religious Right’s rise and the HIV/AIDS crisis. These guys began to think, I can no longer make libertarian arguments about my body, my choice. I’m going to start making arguments about marriage and sexual monogamy.

You also write that Reagan-era gay Republicans organized to keep bathhouses open when Democratic-led cities like San Francisco tried to shut them down as hubs of HIV/AIDS transmission, but their push back has been largely overlooked in histories of the period. This reads like a clear throughline to the opposition to mask mandates.

San Francisco’s Log Cabin organization was at this fight’s forefront because they were led by Duke Armstrong, who was well-known within San Francisco’s leather and BDSM community and a frequent visitor to the city’s bathhouses. They led the fight against the city shutdown of bathhouses on the libertarian grounds that businesses shouldn’t be overregulated or shut down by government, and that people should take their own risk assessments about how they use their body.

I wouldn’t say gay Republicans overall agree with this throughline, but many LGBTQ conservatives, especially in social media spaces, became outspoken advocates against mask mandates and COVID restrictions. They made arguments drawing on the history of government regulation of gay bodies in the HIV/AIDS crisis! It was wild for them to use this argument as a justification against COVID restrictions for conservative audiences. Yet this claim was sort of perfectly attuned for our Trump moment.

You argue that HIV/AIDS was a stark dividing line in the history of LGBTQ Republicanism, marking a permanent before and after for both a political movement and the entire history of LGBTQ+ people. Reagan taking until 1985 to even say the word “AIDS” publicly is the line LGBTQ+ people pass around to define this moment. That’s not just about the bathhouses.

Exactly, because the immediate effect was it decimated gay Republican organizations. Dozens and dozens of members, that first generation, died in every chapter, and they had a more libertarian or even moderate liberal politics. Many left gay Republican organizations [over] what they felt was a complete abandonment by the Republican Party. What came after is a new generation of gay Republicans born after the 1980s and the onset of HIV/AIDS.

The cultural and social conservatism that followed, starting in the 1990s, was absolutely influenced by the HIV/AIDS crisis and the Right’s growing religious conservatism. Gay Republicans accommodated themselves to the anti-feminism, anti-multiculturalism, and anti-PC culture war politics that energized the Right in this decade.

One of this period’s most important consequences is that gay Republicans became the leading advocates of same-sex marriage as a central issue for the LGBTQ community, providing an intellectual foundation before anyone else was making those arguments. Right-of-center gay writers and thinkers like Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, and Jonathan Rauch were among the intellectual architects of those ideas. A lot of the motivation behind gay marriage was a way to gain respectability and normalcy within a larger conservative movement.

In the 2000s, Log Cabin Republicans started expanding exponentially, especially in the Midwest and the South, with a different type of membership coming into the national body. While those groups were small and not as influential in local politics, together they shaped the national organization because they tended to be more culturally conservative. They had an increasing emphasis on gun rights and law-and-order politics.

There’s also internal disagreement over whether Log Cabin Republicans should support hate crimes legislation. Folks from more rural, southern states tended to oppose this. Internal strife emerged as the movement and organizations grew: they contained more variations of conservatism, and it became more right-wing.

This brings us to the current moment. In your conclusion, you write, “Overall, there was a sense that when it came to same-sex marriage, as one Republican advisor said, ‘Even with Christians…that ship has sailed.’ ‘But,’ he added, ‘The trans issue is different.’”¹ How are anti-trans politics shaping gay Republicanism?

It’s interesting to hear that quote during the early days of a second Trump administration. That quote represented what has been true for a long time: the belief that same-sex marriage had become settled law and as a cultural question, with polls showing support across every demographic.

I don’t think that is the case today. Same-sex marriage is now on shakier ground because the anti-trans movement has allowed a broader attack on LGBTQ rights. Clearly, in the [general] American imagination, “LGBTQ politics” does not exist as such: there are trans issues and gay issues—separate and unique. The future of same-sex marriage is increasingly precarious as the anti-trans movement gains victories.

As we’re watching play out in Idaho’s legislature at the time of our conversation today.

In the midst of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, I was interviewing Log Cabin Republican leaders and other gay Republicans, and saying, Help me understand your organization’s position on these issues, because publicly you say that you support trans rights, have supported trans Republican candidates for office, and have trans members in your organization. But I also see you cozying up to Ron DeSantis and supporting what’s happening in Florida and other places. The organization’s president and others said, Oh, there’s a huge distinction between supporting the right of any adult person to live their life as they see fit, and (particularly for them) having employment protections for trans persons—and what we see as the radical gender ideology being forced on the nation’s children. This was a stark dividing line for them.

But my question to them was, Aren’t you worried that this legislative item is actually a wedge issue opening up a broader attack on LGBTQ freedom? They said, No. This is about K through 3rd grade education. What normal person would want a 2nd grader learning about sex in the public classroom?

Of course, that’s not all it was about. That legislation was quickly expanded through 12th grade and became a blueprint for more restrictive legislation that other states took up. This encapsulates a naïve, ahistorical view of the past and of gay Republicans’ place within the conservative movement. They trust that the progress made has been written in stone. That anything happening now was a one-off legislative item and not part of a broader attack on the progress of the last couple of decades, which is very vulnerable.

Gay Republicans would be wise to consider their own history, and recognize how much of the past two decades’ legislative and political achievements—of which they’ve been a fundamental part—is under threat by the very people they’re collaborating with.