Ann Rostow: Trump’s Gay Boyfriends

By Ann Rostow –

Trump’s Gay Boyfriends

The headline on a lengthy piece in The New York Times late last month read: “Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government.” It profiled a certain type of gay man: white, successful, conservative, probably handsome (Trump and company dislike unattractive people), full of themselves, disdainful of most of the rainbow colors that represent the GLBT community beginning with women (although they love Melania), and absolutely indifferent to the civil rights movement that now allows them to be out and proud. 

These are the Log Cabin Republican guys who battled against including transgender rights in our overall fight for equality, the guys who considered transmen and transwomen as freaks with whom they had nothing in common. As the country grew out of its hostility towards gays and lesbians, they found themselves back on top—well educated white men with no further reason to hide in the shadows and no affinity for the women, minorities, and poor people who helped create the conditions for their new-found social respect.

Trump himself has nothing against white gay men. He’s a product of New York and show business. He has often made remarks along the lines of “whatever.” He’s not religious, and has used evangelical Christians for his own political ends without embracing antigay ideology. He even told a reporter back in 2016 that Caitlin Jenner could use any bathroom she liked in Trump Tower, with an attitude of, “Who cares about this sort of stuff?” Yet, regardless of his personal views, he has had no problem throwing Caitlin and the rest of us under the bus when it suits his transactional purposes, which is now and forever.

The A-Gays, as the Times calls them, don’t worry about any of that. Thiel, Grenell, Bessent, Moran, and all the lesser-known brothers-in-arms believe the fight for gay rights has been won. Who cares about AIDS funding or transgender soldiers? Who cares about the High Court’s hard-right shift and the antigay policies that the justices have allowed to fester? The Times quoted journalist James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, who a few years ago captured what the A-Gays see in the president: “He’s like a drag queen. He’s outrageous, he’s transgressive, he’s a narcissist the likes of which we haven’t seen since Alexander the Great.” 

And thirty-something Casey Flores, who fundraises for the Kennedy Center, told the Times that the gay left “just can’t handle the fact that President Trump loves the gays … . This idea that Republicans hate gays, that’s just so not the case, as clearly evidenced by all of us,” he continued. “We’re so over it. We just want to help the country.”

Our LGBTQILMNOP community has always had fractures and differences. Gay and trans people come in all ages, all colors, all faiths. We have PhDs and high school educations. We make high six figures or work three jobs to survive. We are married, single, parents or not. Historically, we have been held together by one main thing—a high tide of social disapproval, which has ebbed continuously since the late 20th century. 

Gone are the secretive gay bars, the code words, the various handkerchiefs that signaled whatever they signaled. The Pride parades and festivals that once required courage to attend have become routine annual funfests, although lately they are reverting to their political roots. The ferocity of the Trump administration’s crackdown on our people has indeed brought back a certain sense of solidarity, but the fractures are like global warming, and great blocks are separating in the warming waters. 

Does a middle-class lesbian family with kids care that the name “Harvey Milk” was removed from a Navy ship? Or are they worried about insurance and school districts? Does a cisgender GenZ kid care whether or not a transgender boy can use the high school bathroom in some remote state, or is she focused on job hunting and college debt? Do we care that transgender women prisoners are being transferred to male prison populations despite court orders and existing law? Or are we more concerned with what’s new on BritBox and whether or not we really have to change the sheets every week? (Because they still seem okay to me.) 

We’re not in the same boat anymore. Our civil rights movement requires new incentives to work together. Don’t ask me what those might be, but let’s just say that we’re not counting on the Trump boys to help us out. 

Don’t Worry Too Much About Marriage

GLBT fundraisers are continuing to alarm potential donors with the idea that marriage equality is on the High Court’s chopping block, even though the case they’re citing has not been selected for review, and would not, in my opinion, be a direct threat to the 2015 precedent even if it were to land on the next docket. 

That said, even I admit that the Court has gone places we wouldn’t have dreamed possible just a year or so ago. Just this week, the Court allowed Trump to stop and question people who looked suspiciously like illegal immigrants, namely Spanish speakers, people who look Latino, and people looking for jobs or working at job sites that might make use of immigrant labor. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t list the various constitutional and statutory rules that are violated by these ICE practices, but there are many. Plus, we’ve a constant flow of insanity coming out of this Court: People allowed to pray in public school settings, tax payer funds going to religious schools in Maine, trans kids and their parents blocked from medical treatment, birthright citizenship suspended pending further litigation that could take forever, and so much more. Let’s not even look back to the end of Roe v Wade or the attacks on marriage equality from Justices Thomas and Alito. 

So, of course, everyone is worried. As I mentioned last week, the case in question is another effort by former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, controlled like a puppet by her activist lawyers at Liberty Counsel, to overturn marriage rights, this time through an appeal of damages that were awarded to one of the two gay couples denied marriage licenses at Davis’ office. (Another gay couple didn’t get money damages, which I didn’t quite understand, although they were represented by a different lawyer in a different procedure.) At any rate, Davis has been litigating for her right to ignore the law of the land for ten years now, with the help of Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel head honcho who has made same-sex marriage his White Whale.

Staver’s petition asks the justices to consider three issues, two of them concerning whether or not Davis should be liable for damages based on emotional distress, and the third, which asks simply: “Whether Obergefell v Hodges … and the legal fiction of substantive due process should be overturned.” 

Substantive due process is the foundation of privacy cases going back to the overturning of Connecticut’s laws against the sale of contraceptives in 1965. It stretches back in time and encompasses more than my background allows me to cover, but it basically protects liberties that may not be specifically listed in the Constitution, but are essential to the idea that we are protected against gross government interference in our lives. The privacy cases include the right to intimate relationships, the right to parent, the right to abortion, and our right to marry. Justice Thomas, in particular, has opined that the whole kit and caboodle should be tossed out, because Justice Thomas is out of his freaking mind.

So, this is the context for the fear that marriage equality could be overturned. Would the High Court accept review of Kim Davis’ rant-fest over money damages? If so, would they accept the third question on Mat Staver’s petition? If so, would they really call into question the hundreds of cases decided under substantive due process? Or would they carve out marriage equality as they carved out abortion rights? 

The answer is almost certainly not. Thomas and Alito would have no problem doing so, but it’s hard to find three other justices willing to throw the nation into chaos, undermine thousands of GLBT families, shatter the lives of GLBT youth looking ahead to their futures, and throw a spanner into the bureaucracies that govern married couples in America. Same-sex marriages aren’t just about gay and lesbian couples. They involve all the heterosexual family members that relate to those marriages. I know my step-kids, in-laws, and seven grandchildren would not be happy if my wife and I were attacked in this fashion. 

Documenting Denial

All this talk about marriage equality was meant as a preface to my next subject. Even if the justices would not dare to overturn their 2015 decision in Obergefell, there are a number of ways to undermine marriage equality, and, in fact, they’ve already done so by ruling that a Christian web designer was not required to accept gay clients, even though state law in Colorado forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation. 

That case was based on the designer’s Free Speech rights, and, in theory, we can’t be forced to express ideas we loathe, whether for religious or other reasons. But still, it was a loophole that lower courts dismissed. What if many state anti-discrimination statutes were effectively rendered toothless by High Court cases that find other loopholes or place antigay Christian sentiments above the law? That’s possible, and while marriage would still be legal, it’s not hard to imagine a second-class status that makes it harder for same-sex couples to operate. 

That brings me to an incredibly valuable project initiated over the last five years by SMU law professor Dale Carpenter and his research assistants called “Documenting Denial.”

Of course, you knew about the web designer, and the guy who wouldn’t sell cakes in Colorado, Carpenter writes. “But did you know about the stylist in Tennessee who refused to cut hair or apply makeup to the women in a wedding party for two men? Or the instructor in Missouri who spurned two grooms seeking dance lessons for their ceremony because it ‘would make everyone else in the room uncomfortable’? It’s unlikely you’ve heard about the North Carolina trolley company that turned down, on religious grounds, a request to transport a gay couple to their wedding ceremony in a remote mountainous location.”

Carpenter has just released a compendium of 64 instances since 2004 in which wedding purveyors or others denied wedding services to gay couples based on faith or simple bias. The record includes “publicly known” denials, and includes not just litigated cases but also preemptive lawsuits filed by antigay businesses that want to make sure they would not be required to serve same-sex couples. The list includes names, facts, dates, locations, services, and court actions, if those are involved, and the outcomes. 

As Carpenter speculates, the list of documented situations is likely a small fraction of the actual hurdles faced by gay couples who have planned and arranged weddings in the years since Massachusetts legalized marriage two decades ago, and one can imagine that most couples, when faced with hesitancy or rejection, simply found another business to call. After all, no one wants to force a grudging florist or hostile bed and breakfast to participate in what is supposed to be a joyous occasion. 

But still, the project will provide some hard facts and figures to lawyers and judges whom we expect will be handling more and more of these kinds of cases. Carpenter specializes in GLBT legal issues and wrote the book on Lawrence v Texas. But he has a complicated take on this kind of discrimination, evaluating competing constitutional rights with an empathy that has often eluded me and led to several friendly discussions, where I take the side of the gay customer and Dale suggests (wrongly) that First Amendment rights are also constitutionally protected. 

We’d both agree on something, like the cake guy in Colorado, but then Dale would argue that a Christian photographer can’t be obliged to shoot a wedding under the First Amendment. He was probably right, being a constitutional lawyer and all, but still. I love him anyway.

Documenting Denial is ongoing and the team “invites readers to send corrections and additions to: documentingdenial@smu.edu

If making suggestions for additional cases that should be added, please send links or other documentation supporting the additions.

This has got to be the first time I haven’t had room for absurd anecdotes and unrelated tangents because I’ve been so serious. I won’t let it happen again.

arostow@aol.com

GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on September 11, 2025