Matthew is joined by historian Neil J. Young, co-host of the excellent Past Present Podcast, to talk about his new book: Coming Out Republican: a History of the Gay Right.
Young’s riveting storytelling shows how, beginning in the aftermath of WWII, many American gay men—born into socially conservative and religious families from which they had struggled to individuate—hitched the wagon of their political hopes to a Republican party they believed would champion their privacy and individual civil rights.
Ground zero for their fiercely libertarian clubs and action committees was San Francisco, where a culture of rugged entrepreneurship fostered the slogan “Keep the government out of our bedrooms, and out of our wallets.” It was an individualist politics that looked to Civil Rights and women’s rights movements for inspiration, but not allyship.
In time that same GOP would lead a culture war against everything queer—paradoxically led by closeted gay politicians who, with deeply conflicted motives, legislated against their fellows. But even as the tide turned, many gay Republicans kept their shoulders to the unforgiving wheel of respectability politics.
Young illuminates the flashes of bravery and self-reliance in these men’s stories, but also shows what happens when a marginalized group seeks acceptance and political power—instead of liberation—within a culture built on exclusion.
Neil writes for WaPo, the Atlantic, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Vox, Politico, Slate, and the New York Times.
Show Notes
Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, Young
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Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I can add to that tagline that so much of the social and political conflict we study boils down to the question, at whose expense will you pursue your personal freedom and what will you lose on that journey?
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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My guest today, at long last, is historian Neil J. Young, who you might know as the co-host of the excellent Past Present podcast, along with our friend Natalia Petrozzella and Nicole Hemmer.
His first book from 2015 was We Gather Together, The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, and it explored the rise of the religious right and the challenges of building alliances.
Thank you, Matthew.
conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons. He writes for the Washington Post,
the Atlantic, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Vox, Political Slate, and the New York Times.
But he's here today to talk about his new book, out just now, called Coming Out Republican,
A History of the Gay Right. Welcome to you, Neil. Thank you, Matthew. It's great to be here.
Now, I hope you're okay as I gush for a little bit over this book and encourage listeners to go out
Is that all right with you?
Oh, please gush away.
I love it.
I'm not exaggerating or blowing smoke.
I read a lot of good books, I talk to a lot of great authors, but this is a book that makes the project of intellectual life worthwhile.
You know, there's history as fact, there's history as storytelling, but then there's history as felt experience, and you really managed to do all three here in a rich and layered and deeply researched diorama of stories that illuminate the lives of conservative gay men.
So, in the broadest strokes, what you've written is an account about how, beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War, many American gay men, often from socially conservative and religious families from which they had struggled to individuate but not necessarily rupture if they could help it, hitched the wagon of their political hopes to a Republican Party they believed would champion their privacy and individual civil rights, but which eventually led a culture war against them.
And then, even as that tide turned, many of these entrepreneurs, community organizers, and political strategists kept their shoulders to the unforgiving wheel of respectability politics.
Is that a good summation, Neil?
I think that that's a really smart interpretation of so much of this narrative.
Definitely it's a major theme of the book, this notion of respectability, and that notion and the way it's employed by very different actors changes a lot over time, which I think is an important part of the history here.
To that broader question, the 30,000-foot question, I kind of wanted to propose that when any marginalized or stigmatized group seeks dignity, it's like they face a fork in the road.
Are they going to revolt against the basic power structures of the dominant culture, or are they going to assimilate into and master those same structures?
So, in documenting the history of the gay right, It seems that you're really illuminating the advancements, the compromises, and the regrets of those that choose respectability.
Totally, and you're right to remind us that this is a very common debate within so many different movements, especially social movements.
Think of debates within the civil rights movement.
are the women's rights movement.
I think also within the broader LGBTQ rights movement, which path do we pursue forward?
How do we show ourselves to be deserving of the things that we're arguing for?
That's a commonality across so many movements.
Gay Republicans figure in this history really interestingly because for much of the history they're aligned with a broader consensus of gay and lesbian persons who believe That we're talking about the 50s, the 60s, the 1970s here, who believe that in order to have a visible presence in American life, let alone to have any rights granted to them, they have to act and behave a certain way.
That becomes an argument that becomes more and more conservative over time, as it does in every social movement, but that one that these gay Republicans are particularly positioned to continue to uphold, even as much of the LGBTQ left, has started to dispense with it, or it becomes more of a
internal debate on the left where it remains a sort of consistent philosophy for gay Republicans.
So I have a second top line question, which is really a proposition related directly to our beat on conspirituality,
which is that when one belongs to a marginalized group, one will be targeted by conspiracy theories.
They will say that you are corrupting the youth, ruining families, depressing morale in the military, or erasing the difference between men and women.
They will say that you have an agenda.
And in response, you may attempt to ingratiate yourself to say, no, I'm not like that.
I'm one of the good ones.
I'm one of the good gay men, and so on.
And this might not work.
Yes, although I think it's not a surprising strategy given especially the degrees of oppression and persecution on gay persons for much of the period of history I'm talking about to say that the things that I'm being charged with are Completely false.
They have nothing to do with the life that I'm leading, and let me show you.
Again, let me show you how respectable I am, how patriotic I am, how upstanding I am, how clean-cut and gender-conforming I am.
I mean, these are all strategies, again, not only that gay Republicans are using, especially in these early decades, but that gay Republicans continue to assert through the decades It works in many ways, but it also doesn't work because, and I think it depends on who the audience is and where these messages are effective and where they weren't.
And I think a lot of the strategy of gay Republicans was, we're never going to reach the far right wing nuts of our own party or of our own Conservative movement, but there's a lot within the Republican Party who are libertarians, who have sort of different ideas of politics that we can reach.
And also there's a broad swath of middle Americans who are sort of moderates or independents who we can shift and that we can change their minds through our conservative appearances, through our conservative reputation.
And so, you know, one of the things I think is interesting about this Demographic I'm writing about is the way in which they employed employed different strategies with different audiences and to see how they were successful and where they weren't successful.
What sort of ways they moved progress forward and other ways how they accommodated a sort of Backlash conservatism that never went away.
Let's turn then to a couple of those stories.
There are so many in the book, it's kind of hard to choose a few or where to start.
But the two that I've chosen, I think, give us a doorway into the entire world that you reveal.
There's one story that expresses a philosophical and theoretical paradox in gay conservative life.
And then there's a second that presents a kind of psychological crisis.
Now, the first one comes in the chapter called Forgotten Country, where you recount the life and times of Leonard Matlovich.
And to give a sense of how catchy the prose is, I'm going to read the opening graph, if that's okay with you.
Pinned on his Air Force Blues.
Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich wore a bronze star and a purple heart, alongside a large array of military ribbons.
Underneath the medals, still lodged inside his body, were other reminders from his time in the Vietnam War.
Metal fragments embedded in his arm and torso from a landmine he had stepped on during his second tour of duty in Da Nang.
Most soldiers would have retired from combat after that.
But after four months in the hospital, Matlovich promptly signed up for his third tour.
When he finally returned to the United States, the shrapnel and medals marked him as an American hero.
But even they couldn't protect him from what the U.S.
military would do once he made his announcement to the world.
I Am A Homosexual read the oversized headline on the September 8, 1975 issue of Time Magazine, bearing a photograph of Matlovich in his Air Force uniform, making it the first news magazine to feature an openly gay person on its cover.
It's quite a moment, Neil.
You know, this was a shocking moment, and one I didn't know about.
Before I researched this book, but Matlovich was considered the most famous gay man in America in the 1970s.
Now granted, there wasn't a lot of competition, right?
Because there wasn't there weren't very many out gay men, but he's famous before Harvey Milk is famous.
His announcement had been planned out well in advance, in coordination with the ACLU, and it was calculated to force the military into discharging him in a way that would allow him and his lawyers to challenge that discrimination in court.
And observers at the time noted his perfect positioning for the role.
He's a decorated veteran and patriot.
His masculinity seems to be unimpeachable.
But he wasn't exactly an ally to all gay men, was he?
No, and I don't think that that would be a word he would have even used for himself.
Like, I don't think that that was part of his consciousness.
He was a fierce individualist.
I mean, he was a conservative Republican, and he had grown up in a very conservative Southern family, a very racist Southern family.
He had dispensed with that racism himself through experiences he had in the U.S.
military, but he retained a fierce commitment to what he believed was individualism.
And he thought what he was doing was he was pursuing his right to serve in the U.S.
military, which he believed was a constitutional right that he had, one that he thought would allow him to be the upstanding patriot that he believed himself to be.
And also that he obviously believed that, you know, in securing this right, it would extend to others.
So, he knows and he believes that he's part of something larger than just him.
But he doesn't imagine a sense of politics that is expansive that allies him with others
like him as much as he just thinks like, I'm going to achieve this legal victory and that'll
benefit others as well.
Well I think your summary statement says a lot in the chapter.
You write that he hoped his public profile would show straight Americans that gay men and women were just like them.
Everyday folks who loved their country and wanted to defend it, not radicals who wanted to remake every aspect of American life.
So I guess the question is, Was that a naive hope?
Yes and no.
I think in a lot of ways it aligns with what a lot of folks on the LGBTQ left or the gay left as it were
in the 1970s were also thinking.
Again, what we've talked about is, show yourself as honorable, as respectable,
as hardworking, doing the right thing and let that shift Americans' attitudes
about us being promiscuous degenerates, about being all the sorts of things
that gay men and women were believed to be in these years.
And it was successful.
I mean, it's amazing how much his public image shapes and changes public perceptions
about homosexual persons in these years.
But also, it's...
It's not enough, right?
I mean, he certainly doesn't win his legal battle and his visibility also inspires a larger backlash that we see taking place and just starting to form in these same years that we know really culminates or at least grows to a sort of fever pitch in the 1980s for a whole host of reasons, including, you know, the emergence of HIV AIDS.
There's a way in which he's both changing public perceptions and also reinvigorating a deeply held homophobia in the country that's, you know, stimulated by his public presence and all the attention he's getting.
But I will say the one other thing, and I think that this is a consistent theme of the people I'm writing about in this book.
And if I think a particular strategy of gay Republicans is that they really had a long view of history in mind, that what they were doing was slowly developing change, and that this was going to take a long time.
And Leonard Matlovich, he doesn't live to see, I mean, he dies in the late 80s, so he dies far before.
There's the sort of transformation of military policy, let alone all these other things that he might have cared about.
But he's setting something in motion that I think is really, really important.
He's laying a foundation upon which the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell several decades later is built.
We will return to the backlash in a moment, but I want to pick up on your mention that his early years were steeped in Southern racism.
Because, as you mentioned, at a certain point, he turned seemingly 180 degrees to begin to learn and take on the language of the Civil Rights Movement.
But studying the strategies of Martin Luther King Jr.
is not really the same as developing an intersectional working model of justice, is it?
Yeah, definitely not.
And he did not have an intersectional model of justice at all.
So he grew up in a very racist family.
He lived, you know, most of his life in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida.
You know, he was sort of a typical white Southern racist of this period.
The military transforms his ideas. He sees Black soldiers that he really admires fighting alongside him
in Vietnam. He has, you know, Black officers who are above him who he really respects.
And this, you know, to his credit, really reshapes his mind and his thinking.
And he actually ends up when he comes back from the battlefront and pursues his sort of longer career in the military, he is a race relations instructor.
Right.
And so he's teaching these courses about sort of civil rights within the military structure when he's also making these decisions about coming out publicly.
He, however, and I think that this is true for a lot of gay Republicans, they cite the civil rights movement as a sort of justification for their own cause.
But it doesn't mean they embrace a politics that's rights-based or that, as you say, is intersectional.
As much as they just think, okay, there's been the civil rights movement, there's been the women's rights movement, we're next.
You know, it's sort of this notion of history.
History is progress.
These things have happened.
We are tying ourselves to those traditions from the standpoint that we're up next.
Give us our rights and leave us alone.
This isn't about, you know, let's connect together and form a broader remaking of American society.
Part of what he's resisting is this notion that radical gay liberation rhetoric will provoke a more repressive backlash, but as you've noted, backlash comes nonetheless.
I wonder If you think heteronormative culture will strike back at the socially acceptable or straight identified gay man with a kind of equal wrath to the way that they strike back at the radical because I mean in one sense
It might be said that guys like Matlovich, from a conservative point of view, or a socially conservative point of view, are lying, aren't they?
That, you know, he only looks like a real man, a real patriot, and isn't that imagined deception perhaps more dangerous?
Yeah, I think that that's absolutely a response that someone like Matlovich can generate.
But I also think that, like, this works in multiple ways.
He was seen as an American hero.
I mean, if you look at the coverage of him, it was astonishing me to think To think about like this is being written in 1975 1976 when there's horrible public attitudes about homosexuality and like all these articles are talking about like what a masculine hero this man and and all these women are being quoted saying you know if he were straight I'd want my daughter to marry him but I certainly would love him to be my next-door neighbor so that is happening and that's that's part of
The changing response that someone like him is bringing about and also there is a response that I think you're right to point us to which is even more inflamed because how dare he try and pass himself As a hero, how dare he claim to be masculine when he sleeps with men, right?
How, you know, it generates an even stronger vitriol because it's attached to the very things that they say homosexuals cannot be.
And so I think that that's the sort of attention that you see in both his life and his public representation and also in the larger history here.
Okay, so the second story that I wanted to focus on, John Henson.
Maybe you can give us the 101 on Henson.
Sure.
John Henson was a man from Southern Mississippi.
He ran for Congress and he wins in the late 1970s.
But before that happened, he had worked in Republican politics in Washington, D.C.
for most of the 1970s.
All the while he's doing this, he is having sex with men in Washington, D.C.
in parks.
He's also someone who survives the Cinema Follies fire, which was a fire that happened at a Gay adult theater in Washington, D.C.
in the 1970s.
It killed nine closeted men, and he was one of the few survivors from that.
So this was never known until years later, but he's rescued from the fire.
He runs for Congress.
He's also at one point arrested for having sex beside the Iwo Jima Memorial, which was a very popular pickup spot at the time.
He was doing whatever he could to hide his secret, including he has a fiance while he's running for Congress,
who he is constantly showing at campaign events.
And he's not the only closeted gay Republican who is presenting himself as a social conservative
in this period.
There's also another congressman named Bob Bowman, who's married and has four children
and has this very public image as a devout Catholic.
And certainly one of the leaders of the social conservative movement
that's taking shape in the late 1970s.
There's also Terry Dolan who is another closeted gay man.
He is single.
He doesn't pretend to be straight.
But Terry Dolan is the head of an organization called the National Conservative Political Action Committee,
which is a grassroots conservative organization that's very important to the election of Ronald Reagan
in 1980 and also the movement of social conservatism.
All of these men are choosing different strategies to conceal their homosexuality.
And one of the strategies I think that all of them are using is a very aggressive conservative politics
and a very aggressive conservative reputation and conservative presentation.
That's what I want to get to.
And I just have to compliment you and say that you're very disciplined in the book to stick with history and not to veer too far into psychology, which is good because, you know, you really could go a long way down that slippery slope.
I have this feeling in reading these stories that the conflict between liberation and compliance is this existential matter for everyone, and that your subjects really illuminate how that happens and what's at stake.
But with regard to Hinson and Bauman and Dolan, when a person is that terrified of his own nature and how he will be punished, For it, does it make sense that he would legislate against his fellows to you?
Like, do these guys show us a hidden reactionary principle that the repressed person might want a society in which he remains disciplined and his fears remain at bay?
Yeah, I think so.
And I think, you know, think about in the case of Bauman, who is also a devout Catholic.
So I think there's both sort of the political and the religious ways in which discipline and sort of strictures on this sort of life are both upheld and engaged and also in the case of, you
know, politics that he's at the forefront of helping push an anti-gay legislative agenda forward. I
mean, it's also striking that up until this time, Congress had barely done anything when it came
to not even gay rights, but like there was a really legislation that was punitive.
And he starts developing a series of legislation that's designed to do exactly that.
Now, obviously, there's a longer history where the federal government, especially through the Lavender Scare, has been a very repressive force against homosexuals.
But the sort of late 70s, early 80s anti-gay legislative politics, he's at the forefront of that.
And I think you're right.
I'm not a psychologist.
So I didn't really develop this theme too deeply.
It was something that I grappled with as I wrote about him and the others.
Like, why are they doing this?
You know, he could have been a conservative congressman who just didn't touch this sort of legislation, but he's actually leading it and he's a leading spokesperson around it.
What all is going on there?
Does he think that this is actually a way in which he covers up His life, and it's part of the facade, and I think it's partly that.
But is there also something like deeply psychological at work here about his own self-loathing, about his own self-acceptance?
I think that that is part of it too.
I had to wonder whether these figures could have been caught, or still are some of them, in a feedback loop of enacting policies that make their own criminalized sexual activity more arousing, more appealing in a way.
Yeah, I think that that's an interesting theory.
I'm not, again, a psychologist and certainly not a sex therapist, but I think that that is a very possible One of the things that I think maybe helps us think about this in terms of Bob Bauman was, so he's eventually busted in an FBI sting that's happening around a sort of drug trafficking, sex trafficking ring in Washington, D.C.
in the late 1970s that the police and the FBI had been watching for years.
And Bauman is arrested as part of this bust because one of the sex workers that he often went to was arrested and that sex worker coughed up Bauman's name knowing he's a congressman.
This will, you know, this will be a good name to cough up.
But one of the things that comes out is Bob Bauman was notoriously going to this very dingy gay bar that was known to be a hustler's hangout.
And he was driving there and parking his car in front of this bar that had a congressional license plate on it.
So he could have been so easily caught years before this FBI bust was fully developed.
And so what does that mean that he took those risks?
Is that part of the erotic charge that he was actually creating for himself, of danger, of, am I getting away with this?
Will I get away with this?
And I think also the politics he pursued is like an aspect of that sort of behavior additionally.
Turning to a much darker note, every aspect of gay life in America changes catastrophically with the HIV AIDS crisis.
There's a huge death toll, there's paralyzing fear.
It's a nightmare for dignity and self-perception.
So suddenly the, you know, quote-unquote corrupting influence of gay men on American life is now a medical or pathological phenomenon.
It's a material reason to start talking about quarantining men or tattooing infected men on the ass.
You know, thanks to Bill Buckley, that was his idea.
But there's also a kind of unexpected twist within gay politics at the height of the crisis.
Which is that it's gay Republicans who start advocating for greater personal responsibility in places like San Francisco.
They start arguing that strong measures have to be taken to prevent the spread of the virus.
And really, it's the left-leaning gay men who reject any notion of restricting personal freedom and pleasure.
And it just seems like this is interesting in relation to some of the political alignments that polarized around public health during COVID.
Totally.
And I'll just add that I was writing this chapter and actually this whole book at the height of, you know, COVID lockdown.
It was really interesting for me especially to write about HIV AIDS and these ideas about public health in the 1980s as I sat inside my house in 2020 and 2021.
Gay Republicans show a really fascinating development in this period because in the first half of the decade,
and first of all, we should say that the heart of gay Republicans, really the birthplace
of gay republicanism is San Francisco, which may surprise listeners.
Half of my book is set in California, which, you know, read the book and you'll understand
more about what the history there is.
But in these years, the largest gay Republican organization in the country is this group called Concerned Republicans
for Individual Rights, which was founded in 1977 It's now known today as Log Cabin Club of San Francisco.
It has 250 members in the mid-80s.
It's the largest Republican organization period in the city of San Francisco in this time, and it is a fiercely libertarian organization.
And what that means in the early years of the HIV AIDS crisis is the folks in this group believe that the government shouldn't tell them what to do with their bodies.
You know, I know the individual risk I can take.
I have bodily autonomy.
I can make my own personal decisions about my life and my body and my and my I can make my own medical decisions.
And also the government shouldn't shut down the bathhouses, which is what the San Francisco Public Health Department was trying to do.
And gay Republicans are at the front lines of stopping the bathhouse closure in the 1980s.
However, by the late 1980s, when the epidemic has become so deadly, and it's become particularly devastating for gay Republicans, I mean, Much of the club dies away.
They start to shift their politics and this this idea of personal freedom, which originally they meant I can do whatever I want with my body.
Don't tell me what to do with my body becomes a different sort of discourse of personal responsibility and I should become a monogamous person and we should Advocate for monogamy within the broader gay community.
And this is really the basis by which they start arguing in the late 1980s for the right to same-sex marriage.
We need to have same-sex marriage because the institution of marriage is a conservative one.
It will domesticate and tame gay men.
This is what they're saying.
This will help curtail the disease.
And also if we do this, Then, again, this goes into the politics of respectability, we'll no longer be demonized, we'll no longer be vilified, and we'll show ourselves again to be good, upstanding citizens and other rights, you know, will be extended to us.
And also, we're going to now start attacking the LGBT or the gay left for being, you know, these hedonistic, promiscuous, all the sorts of things that, like, the American right is saying about gay persons in general.
I'm just waiting for the news as to whether or not your PR is going to be able to set you up with an interview on Fox News so that we can watch the brains explode when you go through this story because this is such a complete inversion of what we're fed from the conservative movement today.
I wanted to pick up on something that I just realized in listening to you speaking about, you know, the heart of the modern gay Republican movement being in San Francisco.
It was very clearly drawn out in the book that this had so much to do with entrepreneurship that, you know, coming out of the 50s and 60s, your chances for steady employment as an openly gay man were very, very low.
And so what would you do?
You would open a shop.
You would open a restaurant, you would become a self-made person, and I think that really unlocked the core of libertarianism that you're trying to really demonstrate in this book.
Totally, and this was a big part of, a common element of those who joined the gay Republican clubs in California, both in San Francisco and in Los Angeles, in Southern California.
Lots and lots of entrepreneurs.
Again, many of them had also moved to California from other states, as many a Californian has been transplanted here, like yours truly.
They came out West for job opportunities and also because many of them were sort of fleeing the repression that they'd experienced on the East Coast or in the Midwest, right?
That like they could easily be fired from their jobs if it was found out that they were gay.
So they move out West to a more tolerant environment in general.
And also they develop their own small businesses.
And with that, they sort of have a libertarian politics.
And one of the log cabin clubs on their newsletter, they had some motto that along the lines of, you know, keeping the government out of our bedroom and out of our wallets.
And those were like deeply linked together and in the minds of the sorts of persons in California who were drawn to gay republicanism in these years.
So, bringing us up to the present, the gay right is doing very little and sometimes working against the interests of trans people in terms of legal protections.
And this is happening in an era in which it really counts.
So, from Andrew Sullivan to Andy Ngo to Dave Rubin, the idea is that trans people are some kind of threat to gay men.
How do they reason that out?
Yeah, this is a challenging topic to write about in part because this aspect of American life right now is changing so quickly.
And, you know, in writing a book, especially as a historian, it becomes often uncomfortable and awkward to write about stuff that's happening, that's unfolding as you're writing because you want like the vantage point of 20 years of history.
You know, I was finishing up this book, you know, a good year before it came out and knew so much of the story was even going to change between now and then.
But I think the trans politics issue has been something really fascinating to watch on the right and also on particularly on the gay right.
And, you know, those three names that you mentioned, I would say even among the three, they have different positions here.
I mean, Andrew Sullivan really I think you see that in a lot of his writings, especially in terms of what it means for a Supreme Court decision and other legislation that he's been an advocate for.
And he really strikes a clear line between what he says are trans rights for adults and what he and others call this radical gender ideology that's being forced on children.
But some of the other names you mentioned, I think they don't sort of break apart these politics in those ways as much as they sort of just invoke a trans threat that is There's being forced on the American people in general and also that a lot of them argue is a threat to gay men because they see trans politics as really an ideology of gender and of an ideology that seeks to actually destroy gender and to destroy the gender binary.
And if that is the case, they argue, then maleness and femaleness no longer exist.
No one is No one will ever be called a woman again.
No one will ever be called a man again.
This is the future that they're imagining.
And if men can't say they're men, and if homosexuals can't say that what they are attracted to is another biological man, then this is a threat to homosexuality itself.
And it's such a fascinating line of argumentation to advance because it's, of course, being directed to conservative audiences.
And to uphold homosexuals as a threatened vulnerable minority group that is endangered by the emergence of trans politics and that that argument again is being directed to a conservative audience and that is Quite successful.
I think it's really working.
It's just fascinating to watch.
It's not like gender essentialism ever worked in gay men's favor prior, did it?
Yeah, I don't think so.
But I mean, I think that what's really interesting here is that gay men are being Upheld as victims of this among an audience who has never really been historically interested in thinking about the vulnerability of gay men.
Right.
Previously.
So it's just it's wild to watch.
My last two questions are about how I think we all relate to this subject matter, but I also want to talk about how you relate to it.
Because, you know, this book maintains a very solid third-person omniscient historian's distance.
There's no first-person gay male historian positionality to be found in it.
There's no caveats, apologies, positionality statements.
There's no coming out memories.
And I think this distance is a consequential choice that, in my opinion, gives the book a lot of mainstream capital because it does not feel as though it was written from the margins, even if it was.
And because of that, I think its stories feel broadly relatable and normal, if I can say that.
And I'll even say that the choice honors the subjects in a way because, you know, it feels like it comes from a slightly different era.
It seems to strike the attitude of, you know, my personal life is none of your business.
It doesn't have any bearing on the matter here.
So I want to see if you can just tell us a little bit about making that choice.
I love it.
My narrator's voice is a gay Republican because we don't know what all is involved in my private life, right?
Right.
In part, it's a function of my publisher and the way that this book developed as, you know, part of a trade arm for University Press.
And I think it might have been a bit of a different book if it had been with a different publisher.
As a historian and as someone, as a scholar who is writing for the trade arm of a university press, I really sort of maintain that historian voice in this.
And I thought about sort of personalizing my introduction, inserting myself into it, but that felt like it just didn't feel like the right choice given the rest of the book having like no sense of me as the author, you know, inserting myself into into the text.
And yet at the same time as the author, I feel deeply on the page of every page of this book.
I realize for a reader, they're not going to pick up on that necessarily.
But I will say if there's questions about my biography and how that ties to this project, I grew up in a Republican family.
I always knew I was gay.
I was always interested in politics and conservatism.
That's all shaping the choices I make here as an author.
I'm not a gay Republican.
Actually, one of the things that's been really funny and also oftentimes Quite disappointing is how people are assuming that I have written a memoir So I'm getting especially like nasty DMS or nasty messages on Twitter or to my email of like how dare you and you're you know You're so messed up and all this sort of stuff and I'm like people please read the title the full title of this book Just take a second to think about it.
This is not a memoir and even if it were that's not you know it's not nice that people would so viciously respond to me, but I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but it was a deliberate choice to sort of keep a distant historical narrator's voice through this project, but also I think one of the great opportunities of getting to talk about this book now that it's out in the world in places like podcast and in the articles that I'll be writing is to sort of make myself a little bit more of the story of the work itself and how this project came to be and how I relate to that.
I have to say that the question comes out of this feeling that there's a deep empathy on every page that just has to come from lived experience.
And so that's really my last question.
You know, you approach your subjects in a way that has to be guided by your own experiences, how they reckoned with their conservative families, their communities.
You know, and you do play your cards close to the chest when it comes to overt judgments on how the gay right navigates that thicket.
But by the end, as you build up to, like, very cursed spectacles like that of, you know, groups like Gays Against Groomers, which weaponize white masculinity against those who are more marginalized, You do point a cautionary finger at moral bankruptcy, so maybe we can finish with what would you say to young gay men out there about how they can help see these things more clearly, how they can help build a better world?
Yeah, first I'll just say I think that's absolutely right, that the empathy I have for many of the characters in this book, especially in the early decades, is one that I think is Tied to their relatability to my own life and my own experience of, you know, growing up in a conservative family, conservative community, of thinking about the ways in which one makes choices to keep those relationships intact and to grow and develop them.
And I think, again, a lot of the historical actors here, I could really relate to and sympathize with the decisions they were making, even if I didn't necessarily agree with their, you know, broader politics.
In terms of, you know, what would I say to gay young men today?
I think that this book, especially in the end, is a cautionary tale about the limits of individualism.
As much as I think that there is an admirable component to the individualistic tradition in American history, and the one I think that this story itself shows a lot of the benefits of a sort of individualistic
model.
I think we're seeing, especially now, the dangers of an overly individualistic mindset.
This is a time for, especially gay men, to recognize that our history has been tied to a broader sense of community.
And that broader sense of community has given us the rights that we have benefited from, and to think about what that
means for thinking about others who are much more vulnerable in this moment.
And not to sort of pull up the ladder behind us, but to think about who right now is vulnerable and how our choices.
can shape the politics of now because I think one of the things you're really seeing on the right is a weaponization
of homosexuality that's really dangerous because of the way in which it sort of positions gay rights as accomplished.
And I just suggest in the closing pages that we might be skeptical of those sorts of messages and the sort of politics they're headed in.
Neil J. Young, thank you so much for your time today.
It's a fantastic book.
Congratulations on a great achievement.
Thank you for having me.
This was such a wonderful conversation and I really appreciate you having me on.
