My Afternoon With the 'Normal Gay Guys' Who Voted for Trump

Not long ago I went to a party at a penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A young man in a tuxedo greeted me at the door and ushered me into a well-appointed living room, where a fire glowed in a corner and prints of ancient Greek temples overlooked a grand piano. Gathered therein were about 70 gay men, all sporting neat haircuts and festive attire, as well as about half a dozen women, one of whom held a Maltipoo in the crook of her arm.

It was a Sunday afternoon in December, and as I wandered through the crowd I felt as if I could have been at any number of upscale gay holiday gatherings happening across the city. Only a few details—an American flag lapel pin, rainbow-colored campaign signs, a MAGA hat sitting among bottles of Josh Cabernet Sauvignon—told me I was in unique territory. Suffice it to say this was a gay party the likes of which I’d never been to before.

“Nature is healing,” Adam Ewer told the assembled guests. Ewer, 40, is a copresident of the New York City chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, the storied gay conservative political organization that was hosting the event. The mood in the room was jubilant, and not just because Donald Trump was returning to the White House. There were more conservative victories to celebrate.

Daniel Penny, Ewer pointed out, had been acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely. Walmart, he added, was scaling back its DEI programs.

But Ewer, a gregarious Juilliard-trained actor, knew his audience—a group of men who prized irreverence, and who were united not only by their political leanings but by their sexuality. The week prior, Ewer reminded the room, Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had been arrested in Pennsylvania.

“That sick, twisted, deranged, fucking adorable muscle twink,” Ewer said. “I can fix him.”

After a couple more speeches—including one from Andrea Catsimatidis, the daughter of billionaire and New York political fixture John Catsimatidis and the chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party, who wore a candy-apple-red dress with a matching Chanel bag for the occasion—the hosts played “YMCA,” signaling the beginning of the party.

The Village People song, a Trump rally staple, has become a symbol of the vexing incongruities of MAGA. While liberals have attempted to point out the irony of Trump’s use of what is historically considered a gay anthem, given the president’s anti-LGBTQ+ record, the sole original member still performing in the group (and the author of the lyrics) has denied that the song is gay at all—and he would go on to lead an energetic performance of it at Trump’s pre-inauguration event.

For their part, the men in this room observed no such irony in the first place. To them Trump is not only pro-gay but a gay icon unto himself, a champion of masculinity in both its traditional and campy forms, as lovable for his flamboyant excess as for his red-meat invective against the left. “The makeup, the hair, the sharp tongue, the cattiness,” Ewer told me. “He’s the gayest president we’ve ever had.”

And now, from their glowing perch atop the city, they raised their glasses to the four years ahead. Young man, there’s no need to feel down, the Village People sang. You’re in a new town.

If the broad swath of Trump voters once constituted a “silent majority,” pro-Trump gays are the opposite. They represent only a budding faction of the LGBTQ+ community, but they’re very loud.

I began following them around the time of the 2016 election, when Milo Yiannopoulos, in many ways the prime mover of the gay MAGA universe, forged his strange alloy of fey extravagance and far-right grievance in articles for Breitbart News, incessant social media posts, and appearances during his “Dangerous Faggot” speaking tour. (Yiannopoulos now identifies as ex-gay.) In subsequent years his mantle was taken up by other memelords and influencers, among them David Leatherwood (known as the Brokeback Patriot) and drag performer Ryan Woods (known as Lady MAGA USA). So transfixed was I by the brazen antics and the sheer improbability of these men that I even wrote a novel, published early last year, featuring a subplot about a gay MAGA provocateur.

The 2024 election season starred its own cast of gay MAGA personalities. They included Tyler Fahs, known online as @toughtalkty; Shawn Fahey (@ShawnOnTheRight); conservative influencer and political consultant Rob Smith; and Gen Z influencer and OnlyFans performer Michael Doherty. These and the other men I spoke to for this article thrill to different aspects of the MAGA movement. But there was one moment during the 2024 election that resonated equally with all of them—and that perhaps speaks to a difference between them and their more theatrical gay MAGA forebears.

It was the day when JD Vance, appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, said that he wouldn’t be surprised if he and Trump won the “normal gay guy” vote. “They just wanted to be left the hell alone,” Vance said of such gays. “And now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it.”

Vance’s hunch appears to have been incorrect: According to an NBC News exit poll, Trump captured only 12 percent of the LGBT electorate. But for many MAGA gays no sound bite better encapsulated their particular political identity. “We have been widely accepted by the vast majority of the party,” Shawn Fahey, 27, told me. So-called normal gays “want to do our jobs and make our money, and have our family,” Tyler Fahs, 29, said. “We want to exist, and that’s it, and Republicans are absolutely here for that.”

In general, the conservative gays I spoke to seem to feel so secure in their rights under Trump that they don’t necessarily think about their sexuality when they enter the voting booth. Why prioritize their gay identity, some ask, when they can already marry and serve openly in the military, and when they enjoy protections from employment discrimination? Why worry about Republicans’ vilification of the trans community, others ask, when they believe that cause has nothing to do with them?

Any gay person who feels threatened by Trump, Rob Smith told me, has been “brainwashed by left-wing propaganda.”

Despite their minority status within the gay community, MAGA gays believe they are the “normal” ones. And while they feel strongly about a range of political issues—crime, immigration, taxes, gun rights—nothing arouses their reactionary passion more than the “crazy stuff,” to use Vance’s phrase, that they feel has been foisted on them by the LGBTQ+ left. Smith, a 42-year-old Iraq War veteran who has posted on social media about gay men becoming too “feminine,” defined a “normal gay guy” as “basically any gay guy that does not really define themselves by whatever the TQ [in LGBTQ+] is.”

While many gay men feel an instinctive solidarity with trans people, given our shared histories of demonization and ostracization, several of the MAGA gays I spoke to took great pains to distance themselves from the trans movement—as if perhaps they sensed that its unpopularity with Republicans could rub off on them. “A lot of us don’t want to be lumped into the TQ+ community," Michael Doherty told me. “I think us being lumped into the rest of the group is what’s causing a lot of hatred toward gay people again.” As Smith put it, “Trans ideology has zero to do with me as a gay male who is perfectly fine and comfortable in my biological sex.”

The right’s fascination with classical gender roles, and classical masculinity in particular, isn’t a turn-off to these gays—it’s one of its main selling points. Fahs believes Trump has resurrected a “rational, realistic” vision of masculinity—“the protector role”—and it’s one that many MAGA gays seek to emulate.

“If you look at the aesthetics of what you will call the gay MAGA movement, it’s very much traditionally masculine men. They’re walking around with the MAGA hat, they’ve got muscles, they’ve got all that,” Smith said. “People are attracted to this.” Such exhibitionist displays are hardly uncommon in the gay community, where the muscular thirst trap is the coin of the realm. But given MAGA gays’ aversion to gender fluidity, their brawny peacocking takes on an inescapable political valence. Those are anti-woke biceps you’re looking at.

For Doherty, who is 22, the energies of gay MAGA parallel a rightward shift among Gen Z Americans—a phenomenon borne out by exit polling. “They’re kind of fed up with the modern-day Democratic Party,” Doherty told me. “The most important issue for Gen Zers would probably be freedom of speech,” and Democrats, he said, had come to be viewed by many of his peers as the party of politically correct and censorious scolds.

A gay publicist who only agreed to speak to me anonymously suggested that one reason some gays are drawn to the right wing is that it’s simply more fun. Democrats are the “most killjoy people on earth,” he said, whereas there’s something “actually quite gay” about MAGA. “It’s masculine, but it’s also campy and bitchy.” And in its embrace of trash entertainment and penchant for offense it may have more in common with gay culture than the liberal mainstream, which in the publicist’s view has become “painfully” middle-class. “I’ve always liked opera and Jerry Springer, and I feel like Trump—that’s kind of his taste. It’s very high-low.”

As a well-off person whose top concerns are low taxes and free speech, the publicist rejects the idea that LGBTQ+ people should be expected to support Democrats automatically. “Okay, so I sucked some cock—I’ve got to vote blue no matter who?” Much of Democrats’ messaging to LGBTQ+ people, he believes, consists of “fearmongering,” and liberal advocacy organizations only sound alarms about Trump “because they don’t have anything else to fundraise off of.” Unless one buys into such messaging, he argued, the liberal platform holds little appeal. “If you’re a white gay man," he said, "you’re probably in an income bracket where you’re really not getting anything from Democrats.”

Gay men have long affiliated themselves with the Republican Party, and not without political justification. As historian Neil J. Young documents in his history of the gay right, Coming Out Republican, in the 1950s and ’60s, when homophobia was bipartisan, many gays viewed the party of small government as their best hope for liberation. “If government is the biggest oppressor of gay men and women,” Young said of their thinking, “then isn’t the pathway to freedom via the political party that believes in less government and restrained federal power?”

That logic came under strain in the ’80s, as the Democratic Party became more explicitly welcoming toward gays, and the Republican Party, in a bid to appease evangelicals and social conservatives, became more hostile toward them. Nevertheless, gay conservatives maintained their place in the party, working to elect socially moderate candidates and advocating for marriage equality and the end of the military ban, often under the auspices of the Log Cabin Republicans. Historically, Young said, the Log Cabin Republicans “operated as a thorn in the side” of the Republican establishment, but now “they are party insiders, and their job is to pump up Trump.”

Charles Moran, the Log Cabin Republicans’ outgoing national president, told me that the organization had to contend with an “infestation” of uncooperative members, including what he described as a “cabal of Never Trump lesbians,” as it brought itself into line behind the party’s new leader. Its embrace of Trump has paid off. The organization, Moran said, doubled its paid memberships and quintupled its email sign-ups during the 2020 election and now counts 10,000 members nationwide.

Moran and other MAGA gays are eager to itemize the things Trump has done for gay people. They argue that he was the first president to enter office as a supporter of gay marriage; that he launched a campaign to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US by 2030; that he called for homosexuality to be decriminalized worldwide; and that he appointed Richard Grenell as acting director of National Intelligence, making him, at the time, the first out gay person to hold a cabinet-level position.

They also believe the fight for gay rights, at least as they define it, is largely over. Several of the men I spoke to cited the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, for instance, as proof that their right to marry is a settled matter. But that bill was only introduced after Clarence Thomas called into question the constitutional legitimacy of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, and it was opposed by a majority of Republicans in the House and Senate. A 2024 Gallup poll also shows that Republicans’ support for gay marriage, after reaching a high of 55% in 2022, has fallen to 46%.

Young, the historian, believes Republicans’ focus on trans people is an “opening wedge issue into a broader attack on LGBT rights,” none of which can be taken for granted. “No cultural progress, let alone legislative or political progress, is written in stone,” he said. “It feels like we’re in a moment where all of those things are under threat, including marriage equality, and they just do not see it.”

He also sees parallels between the current campaigns against trans people and those targeting gay people by figures such as Anita Bryant in decades past. To see some gay men, once objects of scorn, now joining criticisms of more marginalized parts of the LGBTQ+ community is “heartbreaking,” he said, and also dangerous. “It allows that language to be normalized and adopted more broadly than it would if gay folks weren’t using it themselves.”

DJ Koessler, a progressive political strategist who oversaw social media for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, said that while Trump may pass himself off as gay-friendly, his appointments tell a different story. “Look at the Supreme Court and the justices that he put on the bench, who have given us every indication that they are intent on rolling back our rights,” he said. “Look at who Donald Trump has surrounded himself with, and look at their records.” Trump’s new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, for example, has repeatedly condemned the influence of policies allowing gay people to serve openly in the military.

For many MAGA gays, however, the biggest threat isn’t social conservatives in their own party—it’s what they regard as an intolerant left. Moran views the Log Cabin Republicans as a bulwark not against homophobic conservatives, as it has been for much of its history, but against liberal gays. “We had to build a community for these people who had been completely cast out by the broader LGBT community,” he said. “If there is a reason for Log Cabin Republicans to exist, it is for that reason.” If you’re a gay man who supports Trump, Rob Smith told me, “you are seen as somebody not to be understood, but to be destroyed.”

The camaraderie forged by this perceived adversity was on display at the crowded Log Cabin Republicans holiday party in December, where men in preppy quarter-zips struggled to squeeze past one another and where various microcelebrities of the gay right, among them political commentator Deroy Murdock and former Advocate editor turned conservative firebrand Chadwick Moore, held court among the increasingly buzzed guests. It occurred to me that these were some of the happiest people I’d been around since the day of the election. They radiated a political optimism that I suspected I wouldn’t soon see on any of my liberal friends’ faces, or for that matter my own.

Rob Smith was in attendance, and he was in the midst of a busy week. The next day he would go to the launch party for disgraced former congressman George Santos’s podcast, and that very night he would attend the New York Young Republican Club gala at Cipriani Wall Street, where Steve Bannon would muse about the possibility of a third Trump term. Smith wanted to know if there would be a photo shoot for this article. “Put me in Balenciaga,” he said, throwing back his head with a smile.

As the party wore on, Adam Ewer donned a red MAGA hat and darted jovially among the guests. Ewer has sometimes struggled to be open about his political leanings, fearing censure from New York City’s liberal milieu. But he’s found a community in the Log Cabin Republicans, and he believes the nation more generally is relaxing into its rightward turn. “I think the culture and the majority of voters finally have grown sick of the empire,” he said, as flames danced in the fireplace behind him.

Weeks later, during Trump’s scorched-earth return to office, the men I spoke to, having long felt like the underdogs of the LGBTQ+ community, would see their grievances transformed into national policy. Marco Rubio, in one of his first acts as secretary of state, would ban Pride flags from State Department properties domestically and internationally—a move that Shawn Fahey would praise in a viral post, saying, “Get your sense of entitlement in check. We’re done pandering.” The State Department would also axe “TQ” from references to LGBTQ people on its website, and Trump would sign an executive order effectively banning transgender student athletes from women’s sports. The assault by Elon Musk’s DOGE team on USAID would be met with applause by Tyler Fahs, even though it may imperil HIV/AIDS programs worldwide. Like most Republicans, MAGA gays would fall in lockstep with Trump at nearly every turn, even when he aimed his crosshairs at the broader LGBTQ+ community. What would they have to be afraid of? They weren’t in the line of fire. They were the “normal gays,” and they’d won.