David Leatherwood “got chills” – the good kind – when asked to recount his night at a 2020 LGBTQIA+ fundraiser for former President Donald Trump.
“There is nothing like getting a group of 600 gays together under one roof in this fabulous venue with Donald Trump, the Queen of camp, or the King of camp, I guess I should say,” says Leatherwood, who is widely known by his online persona The Brokeback Patriot.
“Trump is a gay man’s dream because he’s like a drag queen. He comes out with a show. He’s a performance artist. He’s hilarious and irreverent … [and] embodies gay humour,” says Leatherwood, adding that Trump is “catty, sassy” and “charming.”
Despite Leatherwood’s enthusiasm, LGBTQIA+ voters have overwhelmingly leaned toward the Democratic candidate throughout history.
The margins have fluctuated throughout the last three election cycles. For example, 27 percent of voters who identified as LGBTQIA+ voted for Trump in 2020, compared to just 14 percent in 2016. And according to a poll released last month, more than 70 percent of LGBTQIA+ voters indicated that they will be voting for Harris, compared to eight percent who said they’d be voting for Trump.
In 2024, LGBTQIA+ voters are becoming one of the fastest growing voting blocs and are projected to represent nearly one fifth of voters by 2040. There are roughly 24.5 million eligible LGBTQIA+ voters in the US today and after the 2020 election there were reports stating that had the queer community stayed home, Trump might have won.
Because of this, reaching the LGBTQIA+ community is critical for both parties. For the Trump campaign, this outreach involves a multi-faceted strategy that centres around Melania Trump, a grassroots movement of far-right influencers, transphobic messaging and working with the Log Cabin Republicans.
Before delving into the Trump administration’s strategy, it’s important to understand his track record – which isn’t great – when it comes to LGBTQIA+ policies. As President, he appointed people with aggressively anti-gay track records to his administration including Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions. His Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights rolled back multiple protections for LGBTQIA+ people and he banned trans people from serving in the US military.
Fast forward to 2024 and he has ratcheted up his transphobic language, vowing to crackdown on “transgender insanity” and lying about kids getting gender reassignment surgery at school. In the last week alone, he’s doubled down on his use of anti-transgender narratives in an anti-immigrant context.
According to Accountable for Equality, a nonpartisan research group, “roughly 40 percent of Trump’s TV ads at present are calling attention to Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgery for prisoners – more than on any other issue.” In one ad, the narrator says “Crazy liberal Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
Long before Trump, the GOP has been widely recognised as the party not to vote for when it comes to LGBTQIA+ rights. And with good reason. In 2015, Republican representatives Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee condemned the Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage across the states, calling it “judicial activism” and “unconstitutional.” And in 2022, nearly the entire Democratic caucus voted to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, offering federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriages, while 72 percent of Republicans opposed it.
Despite this, gay conservatives have been organising for the last 50 years. In 1977, the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) formed as an advocacy organisation that aimed to educate Republicans about LGBTQIA+ issues. Their first cause was to rally against the “Briggs Initiative,” a statewide ballot initiative proposed by former Republican Sen. John Briggs that would prevent gay and lesbian people from teaching in schools. They approached Ronald Reagan for support, who then spoke out against the initiative.
The LCR did not endorse Trump in 2016, but they did in 2020. Since then, they have made significant moves to try and sway LGBTQIA+ voters toward a Trump ticket.
“I wanted to see the organisation be an LGBT advocacy group based on conservative policy,” says Jerri Ann Henry, who was executive director of the LCR in 2019. “And I think one of the things that has happened in the last several years and since I left, for better or for worse, is that the Log Cabin has moved to being a part of the Republican National Convention,” says Henry, who will be voting for Harris.
“I think Log Cabin has decided where they’re going to put all their allegiances,” Henry told Uncloseted Media, adding that they now lie with the Trump campaign.
“Anything that happens on the hard right. And that means that if they need to adjust [their narrative] to fit with something happening within his agenda, then that’s what they’re going to do.”
In an email to Uncloseted Media, LCR President Charles Moran wrote that under Donald Trump’s leadership, LCR has “seen the unprecedented growth in not only our organisations’ membership, its fundraising and its relevance, we’ve also experienced major gains with acceptance in the GOP.”
Moran added that Trump has had pro-LGBTQIA+ stances including the expansion of the “Trump Unity Coalition,” described on the LCR website as an “unprecedented effort to engage persuadable LGBT voters and suburban women in the key battleground states.”
“It’s clear that Log Cabin not only has gained the trust of Team Trump, they’re able to perform in earning serious gains for the LGBT community as well,” Moran wrote.
In 2020, the LCR launched OutSpoken, which their X account says is a Media and News Company. Since its launch, it has become integral to Trump’s outreach strategy.
“I was the one who came up with the name. I’m very proud of that,” says Leatherwood, who says he co-founded the organisation and that the messaging reflects that of the Trump campaign. “It’s powered by Log Cabin, but it’s supposed to be kind of a more cultural angle, like utilising social media and also, journalism.” When Leatherwood worked there, he says they’d churn out multiple articles a week, some of which he would write himself.
On OutSpoken’s About page, they explain their mission which is aligned with much of Trump’s messaging: “We champion equality and opportunity, and believe that conservative leadership and policies will provide opportunity for ALL Americans to thrive. For ALL families to flourish. For ALL communities to prosper … We amplify our voices to reach out to mainstream gays and lesbians looking for a common-sense community ready to support one another, not pit one faction against another.”
Its landing page – which presents itself like a political news website – is full of LGBTQIA+ focussed articles that slam Democrats, saying they are the wrong pick when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ vote.
This month, they published an article headlined “Inside HRC’s dangerous, sloppy, and dishonest ‘trans youth’ white paper,” where they describe the Human Rights Campaign – one of the largest LGBTQIA+ advocacy groups in the US – as a “propaganda pusher for the progressive left,” and an “alphabet cult organisation.”
Another recent article is titled “LGBTs are being used as guinea pigs by pill-pushing Democrats,” referring to a drug that, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has proven to reduce the risk of getting a bacterial STI for men who have sex with men and trans women. A third – published this week – misgenders trans women in its headline: “Kamala Harris’s policies are putting women at risk, urge female prisoners housed with men.”
“Everybody with a cell phone is a journalist or thinks they are. Everybody with a camera thinks they’re journalists,” says Henry, adding that this is fuelling misinformation on both sides of the political aisle.
Creating a grassroots network of gay and lesbian influencers is another key strategy for Trump and the GOP when it comes to attracting LGBTQ voters. Last year, OutSpoken published an article titled “Meet the 2023 class of Outspoken Ambassadors,” which they described as a “new crop of anti-left free-thinkers” that are ready to join “the only media outlet dedicated to pushing back against radical gender and alphabet nonsense.”
Among the voices include individuals with Instagram handles like “The Offensive Tra*ny,” “The Gay Republican,” and Arielle Scarcella, who describes herself as a “common sense queen,” and an “actual lesbian.”
On Scarcella’s Instagram, where she has 102,000 followers, she produces pro-Trump videos as well as transphobic videos like one where she mocks teachers who ask their students their pronouns, and uses racist language where she describes Harris as “not even, like, full Black” and as “Black at different times of the day depending on what state she’s giving a speech.”
“I don’t believe in 87 genders. I don’t believe in pronoun policing,” Scarcella told Uncloseted Media, adding that she believes Trump’s outrage toward the transgender community is justifiable due to “the teaching of transgenderism [sic] in school to four, five, and six-year-olds.”
“Anger Entertainment is a very lucrative industry right now. And I guarantee you, it is necessary to have people as part of that to drive clicks, to drive dollars, to be able to go report back and raise money,” says Henry. “To keep people angry and upset and opposed on these issues.”
Scarcella, who “make[s] a good amount of money” from her videos and has turned being a content creator into her full-time job, says her main concern is rooted in a fear that many people assigned female at birth are trying to transition because of internalised homophobia and not because they are truly transgender. “I’m a woman. And I’m also a lesbian, and I know that the majority of these people that think they’re trans men are just simply lesbians that are homophobic.”
Scarcella’s concerns are largely unfounded. A 2021 review of 27 studies involving almost 8,000 teens and adults who had transgender surgeries found that only 1 percent of participants expressed regret.
In spite of that, Trump has used these narratives to sow division within the LGBTQ community by alienating transgender folks. For example, much of the language in Trump’s voter outreach focuses on “gays and lesbians” rather than the entire LGBTQ community.
“I think it’s an absolutely deliberate discursive choice. It’s deliberate language, specifying gays and lesbians and not using the LGBTQ acronym,” Neil J. Young, author of Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, told Uncloseted Media.
“The trans issue is a completely different thing, especially in the sort of average American mind,” says Young. “There is still a real hesitation around a lot of the trans rights that are emerging. So to sort of break apart gay and lesbian from the trans stuff, I think signals to Americans, a sort of generally tolerant position [LGB people] that’s meant to attract suburban voters, independents and moderates,” he says.
According to a new nationwide poll for the Los Angeles Times, acceptance of gay and lesbian people has increased in America, while acceptance of the transgender and non-binary community is lagging. 1 in 4 Americans in the poll said that they would be very upset if their child were transgender or non-binary, twice the number of people who said they would feel that way if their child were gay.
Trump’s voter outreach strategy doesn’t just exclude the trans community. It attacks them.
Many of these attacks focus on parental rights related to gender-affirming healthcare for minors. In a video he released last year, he falsely said, “The left-wing gender insanity … is an act of child abuse. Very simple. Here’s my plan to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth.”
This frustrates Henry who believes this position is antithetical to conservative values. “You as a parent should be in charge of your health care, not a person in a state capitol,” she says. “That has to do with the role of government, the role of family, the role of parents. That’s my conservative values. So I will always have an issue with government takeover of health care decisions.”
In addition to ramping up attacks on the trans community, what’s new this election cycle is that Melania Trump has become the face of her husband’s LGBTQIA+ voter outreach. In April at a sold-out fundraiser put on by the LCR at Mar-a-Lago, Mrs. Trump addressed conservatives. She told the crowd that money raised that night – more than $1 million, according to organisers – would go toward efforts to deploy resources to key swing states in educating voters about conservative LGBTQIA+ issues and deliver pro-Trump messages among gay and lesbian communities. It was later revealed that Mrs. Trump was paid $237,500 by the LCR for the speech.
“It’s hard to even know Melania’s motivations because she seems so disinterested in any of this, right?” says Young.
“[Melania] is sort of the perfect way to present Trump as gay friendly, but to have a little distance between Trump and the actual gay and lesbian organisation. Because this issue has been controversial for evangelicals, who make up a large part of his base,” he says.
“And so I wonder if the Melania bit allows them to sort of walk this fine line in a way that, if it was Trump himself, things would get a bit stickier.”
Another front-facing person is Richard Grenell, who Trump nominated in 2017 as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. While Grenell was the first openly gay person to hold a cabinet-level position in the history of the US, he has criticised the Equality Act, falsely claiming it would grant “special rights” to LGBTQIA+ people and is an attack on religion.
Part of the effectiveness of Trump’s outreach strategy may be how connected higher-level appointees like Grenell are to the grassroots social media influencers.
Leatherwood remembers in 2016 when he was anonymously posting anti-Democratic messaging as Brokeback Patriot and was eventually fired from his job.
Leatherwood says Grenell was “a huge fan of Brokeback” and that he had been “following [him] since day one.”
“The moment that I got fired, I literally got a phone call,” says Leatherwood. “He called me on my phone and he goes, ‘hey, did you really get fired?’ And I was like, ‘yeah.’ And he goes, ‘don’t worry. This is the best thing that ever happened to you.’”
Soon after, The Trump campaign sent Leatherwood “a ton of merch” and he started working for the LCR and producing content for OutSpoken.
Uncloseted Media reached out to Richard Grenell but he did not respond to a request for comment.
With less than a month to go before the election, Jerri Ann Henry now lives in her hometown in South Texas and works on her family ranch. While the former LCR executive director considers herself a lifelong conservative, her decision to vote for Harris lies in a matter of principle and backbone, something she doesn’t believe Trump possesses when it comes to fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights.
“[Harris] is better on LGBTQIA+ issues because Donald Trump has embraced them when they were popular, and he thought that was something that would help him. And then as soon as people started assigning, ‘woke, we don’t like this, etc.,’ he flipped. So I don’t think that Donald Trump’s stance on any of these issues has been related to any principle or cause ever,” she says.
“It was just what he felt was popular, where he had donors. And these are hard issues that do take standing up for actual principle and policy. And I don’t think he’s willing to do that. I think he’s just going to go with whatever turns out his base.”
Additional reporting by Sam Donndelinger and E E Oliver
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