The History of Gay Conservatism
LGBTQ voters overwhelmingly went for Harris, but the idea that gay voters are always going to be solidly blue is a myth.
Review: Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (2024) by Neil J. Young
If November’s election was defined by the surprising rightward drift of several groups long considered reliable Democratic voters—black men, voters under 30, and Latinos, among others—there was one group that not only stayed loyal to the party, but even increased its support. According to NBC’s exit polling, 86% of LGBTQ voters cast ballots for Harris, a 15-point increase from the 71% that had voted for Biden in 2020. This sharp turn away from the Republicans came in the wake of J.D. Vance’s prediction that “normal gays” would vote for Trump; it may have been prodded by Trump’s “very clear anti-trans agenda” and “worries of rollbacks on marriage equality post Roe v. Wade,” as Allison Gash, a political science professor, explained to the Miami Herald. In any case, the 2024 LGBTQ vote appears to be the exception to the rule.
We thought we understood the mosaic of identity-based interest groups that have come to define the Democratic Party’s base. We’ve come to assume that members of sexual, racial, and ethnic minorities naturally align with modern liberalism and the Democratic Party, and we seek special explanations when they don’t. We think we know what identity is, and what sense of community, what sense of politics, should flow from it—if only we could get people to think logically about their own interests.
But in light of the recent defections among other groups once considered a stable part of the Democratic base, perhaps it’s time to question such assumptions. As Neil J. Young’s important new book, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, shows, the relationship between one’s identity and one’s interests or politics isn’t always predictable or straightforward. In nineteen brisk, engaging, historically sequenced chapters, Young lays out some of the ways that gay (mostly) men have aligned not with Democratic Party or progressive politics but with conservative and Republican Party activism over the past 75 years.
He populates this history with colorful and often sympathetic figures whose lives illustrate a variety of paths to conservatism. Some were born into conservative middle-class, military, Catholic, or Protestant families and kept to their parents’ conservative way of thinking. A few rebelled against liberal parents. Some zigzagged more than once between Left and Right. Some hewed close to the spirit of classical liberalism, with its view of privacy and individualism, others to the reactionary logics of classical conservatism: reflexive fealty to God and country.
