A Lesson for HR Pride: The Alt-Right Is Wooing Gays to Fascism

Self-loathing gays suffering from internalized homophobia?

I recently wrote about the disturbing phenomenon of - self-loathing? -  gays voting for and otherwise supporting anti-gay politicians and political parties.  True, it is an minority of the LGBT community that engages in this form of ultimately self destructive behavior, but it remains troublesome.  Now, Hampton Roads Pride has stepped into this excrement by granting a vendor booth to the local "Gays for Trump" organization. They will be present at tomorrow’s PrideFest in Town Point Park.  Having anything Trump at PrideFest is disgusting, in my view, but it gets far worse: 

Joe Jervis, quoting a GAYRVA piece notes that the group in question, "Gays for Trump, was largely spearheaded by a 757 local, Scott Presler, who worked for the Trump campaign under gubernatorial failure and Confederate Flag fetishist Corey Stewart until they led a protest at the Republican National Committee headquarters in DC prompting Trump to fire him . . . . Presler is a main organizer for the extremist group ACT For America, which held dozens of anti-Muslim rallies across the country last weekend. The SPLC describes ACT For America as “the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the country.”  

Outwire757 correctly notes that "the Trump administration, despite promising to be a “friend of the gays” on the campaign trail, has undertaken a laundry list of anti-LGBTQ actions, from rolling back protections for transgender students in public schools, to removing any mention of LGBTQ from federal employment policies, to removing sexual orientation and gender identity questions from the 2020 census, too being the first President in eight years to not proclaim June LGBTQ Pride Month… and much much much more."

Having this group at PrideFest is an insult to those in the community who have labored long and hard to advance LGBT equality - and put up a great deal of money to sponsor Pride Fest.  Obviously, some one at HR Pride failed to vette this group.  Similarly, in my opinion, there needs change in direction from what I see as a too GOP friendly leadership at HR Pride that may be in part due to naivete.   Having been in the GOP for the better part of a decade years ago and a City Committee member for 8 years, the party will NOT be changed from inside. Anyone who thinks otherwise is allowing themselves to be used.  Sadly, the situation is part of an even large problem of some in the LGBT community actively supporting our enemies to the harm of the majority of the LGBT community and other minority groups.   A lengthy piece in Slate looks at how gays are being wooed by the Al-Right and used for its purposes, not civil rights for all citizens.  Here are excerpts:

At the National Policy Institute’s 2015 conference, alt-right star Richard Spencer’s annual Nazi-fest, a speaker named Jack Donovan exhorted the crowd "to leave the world the way you entered it, kicking and screaming and covered in somebody else’s blood." The same year, in the pages of the The Occidental Observer, one of the most prominent white nationalist webzines, another alt-righter, James J. O’Meara, held forth about how "behind the Negro, hidden away, as always, is the darker, more sinister figure of the Judeo. The Negro is the shock troop. The Jew is the ultimate beneficiary.” Aside from being open fascists and “white racialists,” Donovan and O’Meara have another thing in common: They’re both out gay men.

In his book The Homo and the Negro, O’Meara says that gay white men represent the best of what Western culture has to offer because of their "intelligence" and "beauty," and that "Negroes" represent the worst, being incapable of "achievement." Donovan calls women "whores" and "bitches," and, when a questioner on Reddit asked him his views of the Holocaust, responded, "What is this Holocaust thing? I’m drawing a blank."

Both have become influential figures in the alt-right; horribly, they are not the only gay men to respond to an olive branch lately offered by white nationalism. In the United States, unlike in Europe, out gay men have never been welcome in white supremacist groups. The Klan and neo-Nazi groups, the main previous incarnations of white hate in this country, were and still are violently anti-queer. And while a subset of openly gay men has always been conservative (or, as in all populations, casually racist), they never sought to join the racist right. That was before groups like NPI, Counter-Currents Publishing, and American Renaissance started putting out the welcome mat. Since around 2010, some (though by no means all) groups in the leadership of the white nationalist movement have been inviting out cis gay men to speak at their conferences, write for their magazines, and be interviewed in their journals.  And there are many more gay men (and some trans women) who have been profoundly influenced by two white nationalist ideas: the "threat" posed by Islam and the "danger" posed by immigrants. Donovan tries to sugarcoat his own racist beliefs when speaking to his main fan base, gay men who like his macho looks and straight men from the "pickup artist" culture and the manosphere who are desperately trying to learn from him how to be manly. . . . he functions as beefcake for the neofascist cause. He’s parlayed his butch allure into a brand, earning money from a line of T-shirts and wrist guards that say things like BARBARIAN and a series of books that seek to instruct both straight and gay men in how to become more masculine and in particular, more "violent." But when Donovan says violence, he means violence. This is not BDSM. "The ability to use violence effectively is the highest value of masters," Donovan said in a 2017 speech at a fascist think tank in Germany. "It is the primary value of those who create order, who create worlds. Violence is a golden value. Violence rules. Violence is not evil–it is elemental." . . .  it's straight-up people hurting and killing other people he's endorsing.
 And what is all this violence for? Creating small, decentralized "homelands" in this country separated by—surprise!—race. He enthusiastically embraces an idea the alt-right calls "pan-secessionism," under which, as Donovan says in his book A Sky Without Eagles, "gangs" of white men would form "autonomous zones" for themselves and white women, where women "would not be permitted to rule or take part in … political life." The gangs would enforce racial boundary lines, because, as Donovan puts it, whites have "radically different values [and] cultures" than other people, and "loyalty requires preference. It requires discrimination." If Donovan is a caricature of the gay Nazi strongman—almost a personification of the phrase "body fascism" (which was originally used by gay men to critique other gay men's obsession with perfect gym bodies)—his counterpart, James O'Meara, is an embodiment of something that could barely be imagined until now: Nazi camp. I hesitate to write that phrase, because it's almost painful to acknowledge that camp—that subversive, gay "turning" of seriousness into playfulness and straight narratives into gay ones—could be deployed by a Nazi. . . . we no longer have the luxury of assuming that queer tropes are inherently, and trans-historically, progressive. Of course, neither O’Meara nor Donovan actually support gay rights. This is partly because they don't believe in "civil rights." Although O'Meara wants to be part of an imagined elite band of men who love each other and rule society—his version of an Aryan fantasy called the Männerbund—he doesn't want to support, as he put it in the interview with Alternative Right, "some sniveling queen demanding 'my rights!' … 'The plight of the homosexual' … is a Leftist myth." Donovan says explicitly that straight people should be given more power and privileges than gay folks, because their "reproductive sexuality" is superior to ours. Both men openly detest lesbians and trans and genderqueer people. . . . .
 So why are white nationalists smiling in our direction? Most importantly, because it worked in Europe. In Holland, France, Germany, and Sweden, white nationalists have deliberately used LGBTQ people and Muslims as a wedge against one another. Bringing queer people in, in both Europe and America, is a way to grow the neo-fascist movement. It is also a way to court millennials, who are consistently supportive of gay rights even when they swing conservative on other issues. It's a testament to the fact that, in some ways, the queer movement has already won the battle for public opinion. The far right could not beat us, so they decided to join us—in the most superficial way possible. Ultimately, it's a form of pinkwashing, which YourDictionary defines as “the practice of representing something … as gay-friendly in order to soften or downplay aspects of its reputation considered negative. There is another potential benefit: If white supremacists can equate "Muslims" with attacks on LGBTQ people—and women—they might be able to attract liberals and moderates into a kind of anti-immigrant "big tent."

This is what HR Pride unwittingly welcomed to 2017 PrideFest.  

The Farce of Trump's "Pro-LGBT" claims

Trump has totally sold out to anti-LGBT Christofascists

For years now I have had little more than polite contempt for LGBT Republicans who each election cycle claim that the election at hand will be the turning point where the Republican Party will shift its stance from one of comprising an open enemy of LGBT Americans to something less hostile and animus-filled.  Each election then proves that such fantasies of a changed GOP have been nothing more than the delusions of self-loathing gays who for some perverse reason want the acceptance of those who hate them and/or will sell them down the river in a heartbeat to win the votes of Christofascists. This past presidential election proved to be no exception to the same tired phenomenon of LGBT Republicans claiming that this would be the point where a change in course would sweep the Republican Party.  Worse yet, these same suckers/delusional fools claimed that Donald Trump would be "pro-LGBT."  Apparently, those uttering these words paid no attention to Trump selling his soul to Christofascists and anti-gay zealots last June in New York City. Given my past activism in the GOP, I believe it is safe to say that the ONLY thing that will cause the GOP to drop its anti-gay agenda will be repeated electoral defeats (which might have happened if every LGBT individual had gone out to vote and voted Democrat).  A main editorial in the New York Times looks at the foolishness of members of the LGBT community who allowed themselves to be played for fools by Der Trumpenführer and, in my view acted akin to any Jews who voted for Hitler in the 1930's.  Here are excerpts:

It was a jarringly unorthodox moment even for Donald Trump. At a rally in Colorado last October, an audience member handed him a gay pride flag that bore a handwritten endorsement: “LGBTs for TRUMP.” The candidate smiled as he unfurled the flag, displaying it for a few seconds. A spokesman later said Mr. Trump was “proud to carry the ‘L.G.B.T. for Trump’ rainbow flag on stage,” since he was campaigning to be “president for all Americans.”

It didn’t take long for prominent gay Republicans to proclaim that the Republican Party had, at long last, turned a corner on gay rights under Mr. Trump. After he was elected, some gay rights activists held out hope that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, would be staunch allies in the West Wing, considering that they had traveled in liberal circles in New York.

Yet, the nomination of several key officials, who have disparaged the L.G.B.T. community and sought to curtail the rights of its members, has exposed the narrative that Mr. Trump would be a champion of gay and transgender people as a fallacy. “It has been a catastrophe,” said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a leading strategist behind a string of legal and policy victories the community achieved during the Obama administration. “Every twitch we’ve seen from the administration has been anti-L.G.B.T.”

At the Department of Justice, where former Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year delivered an impassioned speech telling transgender Americans, “We see you; we stand with you,” her successor, Jeff Sessions, wasted no time reversing course.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which worked to expand access to health care for gay and transgender Americans, is now being led by Tom Price, who was a vocal opponent of gay rights as a congressman. The agency’s civil rights office, which oversaw regulatory changes that made it easier for transgender people to get insurance coverage for medical care, is now run by Roger Severino, an ultraconservative activist who last year accused the Obama administration of attempting to “coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology.”

Mr. Obama’s last secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning, an openly gay man, was instrumental in nudging the Pentagon brass to allow transgender people to serve openly. Mark Green, a Tennessee state senator nominated to replace him, last year called being transgender a “disease.”

Last month, Health and Human Services amended two surveys of the elderly to remove a question about sexual orientation. The Census Bureau, meanwhile, has scrapped plans to include questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the 2020 Census and the American Community Survey.

The only good news for the L.G.B.T. rights movement this year has come from the courts. . . . For the foreseeable future, the federal courts are likely to be the only avenue for progress.  It’s not too late, of course, for Mr. Trump to act like the transformational Republican on gay rights . . . Yet his record of empty talk makes that seem as unlikely as the sight of a Republican presidential candidate waving a gay pride flag.

And let's not forget that Trump himself signed executive orders reversing non-discrimination protections put in place by the Obama administration.   

Trump Almost Made Jerry Falwell, Jr. Education Secretary - Let That Sink In.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it is impossible in my view to adequately sound the alarm of the dangers posed to LGBT Americans by the incoming Trump/Pence regime.  Many policies in favor of LGBT rights championed by the Obama administration will be rolled back and I am very fearful of what Trump's militantly anti-gay appointees may put forward.  Many - including my husband - say that too many people are in favor of LGBT equality for some of these frightening things to happen, but the reality is that with GOP control of both houses of Congress, there will be little to stop the passage of anti-LGBT legislation, the falsely named First Amendment Defense Act being only the beginning of the likely coming nightmare.  To these naysayers, I would also point out that many Germans believed that Hitler and the Nazis would take their anti-Semitism to the lengths that they did.  Relying on the good will of others for one's rights is both foolish and dangerous.  A column in Huffington Post looks at the danger Trump poses to LGBT Americans.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump has settled on billionaire Besty DeVos as his choice for Secretary of Education, a woman with her own, long anti-LGBTQ record. I’ll get to her further down, but first it’s important, because it reflects on Trump’s first instincts, to focus on the man who appears to have been Trump’s initial choice for the job, and who says he passed on it: Loyal supporter and campaigner, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr. ― a man whose late father and mentor said the attacks of 9/11 were God’s wrath against the United States for its acceptance of homosexuality. 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d like to once again point to New York Times political reporter Maggie Haberman, . . . . set a false narrative for much of the media during the election campaign, headlined, “Donald Trump’s More Accepting Views on Gay Issues Set Him Apart in G.O.P.”  . . . .  Though Trump consistently opposed marriage equality (since 2000) and suggestedto evangelical leaders (and later confirmed) that he’d sign the anti-LGBTQ First Amendment Defense Act, . . . .

So, here we are now, during the transition of Trump’s presidency ― which includes anti-LGBTQ crusader Mike Pence as transition team chair and as a likely most powerful vice president ever ― and religious zealot and enemy of LGBTQ rights Jerry Falwell Jr. says that he was offered, and turned down, the job of Secretary of Education by Trump.

Now, I think I can safely say that neither Mitt Romney, nor John McCain, nor even George W. Bush, would have considered Jerry Falwell Jr. or any other hard-core religious leader . . . . to establish policy for, and administer federal assistance to, America’s public education system. I think I can also safely say that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have made his ardent supporter, Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of the Moral Majority as well as of Liberty University, head of the Education Department either.

But here is Trump, ready to hand the job to a religious zealot whose sole goal, certainly by his actions and statements, would likely be to infuse evangelical Christian doctrine into public schools while silencing and instilling fear in students of minority faiths entirely, such as Muslims.

Over the past eight years the Obama Education Department, through its Office of Civil Rights, has embraced LGBTQ rights. In 2010 it launched a campaign to fight anti-gay and anti-trans bullying in public schools. The Education Department collaborated with five other agencies to form stopbullying.gov, which includes resources for LGBTQ youth.

During those same years, according to Nico Lang in The Advocate, Falwell’s Liberty University hosted a two-day conference, “Understanding Same-sex Attractions and Their Consequences,” which included panelists from various anti-LGBTQ “conversion therapy” organizations. Kevin Roose, who went undercover for a semester at Liberty University in 2007, wrote in New York magazine that condemnation of homosexuality and praise for conversion therapy were also promoted on campus and taught in the classroom there . . . .

After Falwell passed on it, Trump offered the job to Amway billionaire Betsy DeVos, a Trump campaign backer whose family’s foundation is one of the largest contributors to the anti-equality National Organization for Marriage, giving $500,000 to the group. DeVos herself and her husband, fixtures of Michigan’s GOP,  donated $200,000 to Michigan’s successful ballot initiative to ban marriage equality.

DeVos and her husband have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the virulently anti-LGBTQ Focus on the Family ― labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center ― which also promotes “conversion therapy.” 

National LGBT groups have been demanding answers from the Trump transition team and from DeVos herself about her agenda. But Eliza Byard, president of GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ students, notes that even if the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights initiatives are kept intact, DeVos’ promotion of vouchers and tuition tax credits also threatens students’ civil rights, including LGBTQ students . . .

No matter Trump’s actual beliefs on LGBTQ rights, it’s clearly not something he’s taking into account while offering cabinet posts to his most loyal supporters (and don’t forget, anti-LGBTQ Mike Pence is heading up the transition team.)

That’s true whether they be billionaires who supported anti-LGBTQ efforts but backed Trump’s campaign, or religious extremists like Falwell, who helped turn out white evangelical voters for Trump and who would be hellbent on ending the separation of church and state, in public education and beyond.

Be very, very afraid.