From the get-go, Neil J. Young's "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right" makes it manifestly clear that gay Republicans face condemnation both from the queer community and their own political party, which never has fully accepted them. Young, who is gay, is a political historian, commentator, and co-host of the history podcast "Past Present."
His book is the first comprehensive and sympathetic history of the gay right, which he traces from the 1950s up to the present day. Young views gay GOPers as champions of conservative values (i.e. free markets, a strong national defense, and individual liberty) and believed the Republican Party offered LGBTQ+ people the best pathway to freedom. The book uses profiles of key individuals to depict the eras in which they lived.
Young starts with Dorr Legg, a libertarian Republican who founded ONE magazine, the first homophile periodical producing positive portrayals of homosexuality. Legg created a "Homosexual Bill of Rights," which demanded civil equality and that initially scared off leftist gay activists, though they would advocate for it after the Stonewall uprising in 1969.
There were Marvin Liebman and Robert Bauman, pushing conservative agendas in the 1960s and 1970s while hiding their homosexuality. They created Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union. Both were very close associates of William F. Buckley Jr., considered the "granddaddy of modern American conservatism." Bauman was elected to Congress in 1973 becoming a Republican leader by decade's end. In 1980, he was arrested by the FBI for soliciting a 16-year-old sex worker. However, both men later in life came out publicly and advocated for gay Republicans.
In 1975, Republican Leonard Matlovich, a Vietnam War hero, came out and sued the federal government after he was thrown out of the military. A resident of a building at the corner of 18th and Castro streets in San Francisco's LGBTQ neighborhood, Matlovich became the first gay man to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Then there's Terry Dolan, a pollster for Ronald Reagan and head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, who later died of AIDS-related complications.
There were a handful of LGBTQ Republican clubs that arose in the late 1970s, mostly in California. The largest and most powerful one was in Los Angeles. In the early 1990s it linked up with other gay Republican groups to form the national Log Cabin Republicans, overseen by a national office in Washington, D.C., which now counts some 10,000 members in more than 60 chapters in 34 states.
Young, 48, was interviewed by the Bay Area Reporter via email. He was asked why he was inspired to create this book.
"I've had the idea to write this book for a very long time. I'm not a Republican — I've been a registered Democrat for more than two decades — but I grew up in a Republican family and have focused much of my career on the history of conservatism," he wrote.
"I had the experience that I think a lot of LGBTQ folks who grew up in conservative families have had: You go off to college, come out of the closet, develop your own politics, and don't think much more about it. But after college, I moved to New York City and started to meet some guys who were gay Republicans and belonged to an organization I had never heard of — Log Cabin Republicans," Young added. "This was during the George W. Bush presidency, and it was perplexing to me at the time how any LGBTQ person could belong to the GOP, especially with the Bush administration opposing same-sex marriage and the religious right having fully taken control of the Republican Party. So, I started keeping tabs on gay Republicans and paying attention to the work of LCR."
Still some critics have been surprised that a non-Republican would write this book, which was published by University of Chicago Press ($30).
"I'm not sure what has generated that surprise for you and others. Is it an assumption that only a gay Republican would write a history of gay Republicans? Or is it because of the book's tone?" he asked. "Some people have told me they were surprised that my book presented gay Republicans more positively than they expected.
"I can understand that. It surprised me too, I have to say," he stated. "But I think it's important for me to note that I didn't approach writing this book by thinking of myself as a 'non-Republican.' Instead, I wrote it as what I am when I do a project like this — a historian who takes a sort of scholarly objectivity towards my subjects, to the extent that is possible. And I think my tone, especially in the first half of the book, reflects the admiration I felt for so many of the people I'm writing about, even if I don't share their politics."
Young appreciated the bravery of men like leatherman Duke Armstrong, Legg, and Matlovich. In 2008, friends of Matlovich's installed a plaque on the San Francisco building he once called home.
"They showed in coming out of the closet, challenging law enforcement, the military, and the Republican Party, and fighting for their rights and standing up for their principles. And especially in those decades I'm writing about where the Democratic Party wasn't much better on gay rights than the Republicans were," stated Young. "It became easy to understand their argument that in order for gay rights to advance, they needed to work within the party they belonged to and believed in to make things better."
San Francisco's role
Readers will be stunned to discover the huge role San Francisco played in the development of gay Republicans.
"San Francisco is the birthplace of an organized gay Republican movement," stated Young. "This was a fact that surprised me to discover, but one that started to make sense as I dug into my research. In 1977, the first two gay Republican organizations ever formed were launched in San Francisco. One of them, the Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club, didn't last very long. But the other group, called Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, continues to this day, now known as Log Cabin Republicans of San Francisco.
"These clubs were formed primarily to defeat Proposition 6, or the Briggs initiative as it was more popularly known, which was a ballot initiative in the 1978 election that, had it passed, would have made it illegal for any gay or lesbian to work in California's public school system," Young wrote. "Gay Republicans came together in San Francisco — and also in Los Angeles — to form the first gay Republican clubs to defeat the Briggs initiative and to push back against the growing influence of religious conservatives in the Republican Party."
Not surprisingly, Republican leaders in San Francisco were very worried about how poorly their party was faring here.
"Voter registration in San Francisco weighed heavily in favor of the Democratic Party, and Democrats had a big majority in the city's public offices," stated Young. "San Francisco's Republican leaders believed that its gay and lesbian residents were an untapped potential and they also hoped that if gay Republicans had prominence and visibility in the city, it would help attract moderate voters to the GOP. That didn't really work, but it was the motivation behind the local GOP giving support to these clubs being formed."
Another shocker was how many of these early gay Republicans were heavily involved in the city's BDSM community.
"Much of that participation owed to the influence of Duke Armstrong, who was president of CRIR in the early 1980s. Armstrong was very active in San Francisco's leather scene and recruited several of his friends from there to join the group," stated Young. "These guys tended to also be business professionals — Armstrong was a lawyer who owned his own small firm — and they held fiscally conservative economic views that aligned them with the organization and the Republican Party."
It became clear that almost all these gay Republican groups were composed of white, cisgender men with very few lesbians or people of color.
"The first clubs grew primarily through friendship networks and word of mouth, so that tended to keep the groups looking like the people who already belonged to them: middle- and upper-class gay white men," Young stated. "The clubs constantly talked about needing to grow their ranks by bringing in lesbians and people of color, but none of them ever put actual effort into making this happen. I think that reflects the conservatism of these groups, both a lack of commitment to diversity in principle and a limited sense of who belonged."
Gay GOPers failed to reach out
Young notes few lesbians or people of color wanted to join these groups because they were perceived as clubs for white gay men rather than for gay Republicans.
"Women, especially, complained about being overlooked, ignored, and dismissed in many of the clubs. These local chapters were social outlets as much as they were political organizations — a place for gay Republican men to meet and hang out with each other without fear of judgment about their politics," stated Young. "But that meant that many of the men weren't very welcoming to women being among them. Although, notably, several of the clubs were led by lesbians. Apparently, the gay membership didn't mind if sometimes a woman took over the thankless job of running the organizations."
Young argues that having so few lesbians and people of color shaped the politics of these groups, particularly around issues like affirmative action, immigration, and abortion.
"It seems obvious, from my view, that gay Republicans should have formed alliances with other moderate Republican organizations and constituencies like pro-choice women and Black and Brown Republicans in order to have a bigger voice within the GOP and form a coordinated bloc against the religious right forces," Young stated. "But gay Republicans never did so, even as they failed to attract lesbians and persons of color to their organizations. Instead, they refused to take a public stance on abortion, opposed affirmative action and public assistance, and often backed harsher sentencing legislation and anti-immigration policies. In all these ways, their politics reflected their whiteness and maleness, and they often used these identities, rather than their sexuality, to stake their place within the GOP. For these reasons, I think it is very fair to say, as I do in the book, that much of how gay Republicans operated served to support and reinforce the nation's racial hierarchy, economic inequality, and power structure, even as they sought to challenge its anti-gay culture and politics."
Is someone a gay Republican or a Republican gay has long been a debate within the gay conservative movement, as Young noted.
"This title was drawn directly from the title of an article in a Log Cabin publication from the 1990s," he stated. "Those who called themselves 'gay Republicans' typically thought their primary purpose was to show the Republican Party that gays and lesbians belonged to it and, by making themselves more visible, to influence the party to support gay rights or, at least, not advance an anti-gay agenda. Those who identified as a 'Republican gay,' or, as some of them often said, 'a Republican who just happens to be gay,' were much more conservative in their politics overall and thought that the focus should be on influencing the GOP to be a party where sexuality didn't matter. (They never quite articulated how this would actually happen!)"
Young observes that Republican gays even questioned the notion of gay rights.
"They argued that the government should not actively discriminate against gays and lesbians in employment, housing, and marriage, but that they did not believe there should be 'special rights' granted to sexual minorities," stated Young. "Especially in the early years, those who called themselves 'Republican gays' lived more closeted lives and felt more hesitant or uncomfortable about claiming a public identity as a gay person than the 'gay Republican' folks did."
Young comments that this debate has largely receded among gay Republicans.
"However, there is this fairly common habit, especially for those gay Republicans who appear on conservative media, like Fox News, of downplaying one's sexual identity in favor of other identities, especially political and religious ones," he noted. "As one of them has recently said, 'I'm a Christian, a patriotic American, and a free-market, shrink-the-government conservative — who also happens to be gay.'"
Accomplishments
Young was asked what he felt were the chief accomplishments of these gay Republican groups in terms of furthering LGBTQ rights in the U.S.
"Gay Republicans played an enormous and critical role in bringing about the two greatest accomplishments of the LGBTQ rights movement: the end of the military's ban on gay and lesbian servicepersons and the legalization of same-sex marriage," Young stated. "I don't argue that gay Republicans solely achieved this or that they accomplished something that other groups weren't able to. But my point is that they played a vital role in this collaborative work.
"In the case of the military ban, gay Republicans had worked on ending this for decades, often when mainstream gay organizations were not focusing on it. And in 2010, Log Cabin Republicans scored a monumental victory when a district court judge ruled in favor of their lawsuit against the federal government and declared the military ban unconstitutional. This legal victory is what compelled the U.S. Senate to finally overturn 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'
"In the case of same-sex marriage, gay conservatives, like Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, and Jonathan Rauch, were some of its most ardent and effective early advocates, helping mainstream the notion of and the rationale for 'gay marriage' in the public conversation," Young explained. "And gay Republicans played a huge role getting several states to pass gay marriage, especially in the enormously important state of New York, where gay Republicans successfully convinced enough Republican legislators to join with the Democratic minority to finally push marriage equality across the threshold."
Young maintains this is a tactic gay Republicans have been using since the 1980s, especially in California.
"Gay Republicans have always been fairly honest that they know they will never convince most Republican politicians to support LGBTQ rights. But they have always argued that their work was to convince enough Republican legislators to join with their Democratic colleagues in order to pass LGBTQ legislation with a majority vote," he stated. "Gay Republicans did this in California during the 1980s in order to pass one of the nation's first statewide anti-discrimination bills, a significant achievement. Gay Republicans also found that if they could round up a handful of Republicans to vote for LGBTQ bills, it always put pressure on any wavering Democratic legislators to commit their support too. I think all of this demonstrates that gay Republicans have been effective not so much at dramatically transforming their own party around LGBTQ rights, but rather in how they have worked within a two-party political structure to advance LGBTQ rights through bipartisan support."
HIV/AIDS
But Young believes that the HIV/AIDS pandemic had a profound impact on gay Republicans' advocacy for same-sex marriage rights, beginning in the late 1980s. "This marked a real contrast from how many of them had responded to the crisis at the beginning of the decade when they tended to focus more on making arguments about bodily autonomy and sexual freedom," he stated. "In San Francisco, for example, the gay Republican organization helped lead a lawsuit against the city's public health department for closing the bathhouses, which they saw as a Democratic-led conspiracy to interfere in private enterprise and violate individual freedom. (It should be noted that most of the city's gay Democratic organizations also opposed the city's shutdown of the bathhouses.)"
Young argues that by the late 1980s, gay Republicans started to shift their attention away from defending sexual freedom to instead advocating for same-sex marriage. "With the death rates escalating at the end of the decade — the deadly virus was as devastating for the gay Republican clubs as it was for every gay community — gay Republicans started to argue that if same-sex marriage were legal, it would change gay men's sexual habits and help curb the epidemic," Young noted. "They contended that legalizing same-sex marriage would be a public health service, as it would draw gay men into monogamous commitments and alter sexual behavior."
Young credits the vicious homophobia of conservative activists such as Patrick Buchanan and Gary Bauer for refashioning gay Republicans' response to HIV/AIDS.
"Recognizing this growing backlash against gay persons, gay Republicans realized there was no way their libertarian messages about bodily autonomy and personal freedom were going to work now that social conservatives had taken over the GOP and were using HIV/AIDS to fearmonger," stated Young. "So, gay Republicans developed what I have called a 'gay family values politics' that emphasized sexual monogamy, gender conformity, and the need for same-sex marriage to be legalized. I argue that their conservative framing of same-sex marriage worked first with Democrats and independents who, in the 1990s, didn't show much more support for marriage equality than Republicans did. As the great marriage equality activist Evan Wolfson told me, gay conservatives provided the same-sex marriage movement a 'vocabulary' that worked to reach the majority of Americans who wouldn't be persuaded by progressive language. Gay Republicans began developing that vocabulary at the height of and in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic."
Young asserts that gay Republicans have worked to build the modern GOP, alternately resisting some of its worst inclinations while also helping some of its extremism. More recently, gay Republicans have shifted their focus from identity to ideology by attacking "radical gender ideology," which they argue is being forced on the country and also explains the right's obsession with "cancel culture, "wokeness," and critical race theory.
[Editor's note: Next week, Young will discuss how gay Republicans have dealt with Donald Trump and attacks on transgender people.]
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