One Year Out: Still Gay, Still Republican
It’s not my problem if you’re hung up on my politics
It was 7am and already I was an emotional wreck. After giving my editor at The Washington Post a tepid green light to publish, I powered down my computer and telephone and made my way to a café to weather in peaceful isolation what I presumed would be the end of my career in politics.
It was a good run, I thought; perhaps I’d make for a good ditch digger.
Ordinarily, the airing of one’s sexuality is a delicate and intensely private matter, addressed on one’s own terms with those who matter most. But for someone who had devoted nearly a decade in service to a sometimes-hostile Republican party, that wasn’t a privilege I was afforded.
Instead, I had to defend myself to every asshole with Internet access. There are a lot of assholes with Internet access.
The morning was September 4, 2014 and the story whose publication I had just approved disclosed publicly for the first time that I am gay. A gay Republican operative, long-partnered, and I wanted my party finally to embrace my desire to wed the person of my choosing. It was a question over which I had anguished for some time — was it merely enough to be honest with friends and family, or must I, as a consequence of my career, shoulder a heavier burden to live authentically?
Ultimately and grudgingly, I accepted that I owned a heavier responsibility: pollsters have isolated the opinion-shaping power of coming out as one of the most significant catalysts to positive shifts in American attitudes of LGBTQ persons.
The simple act of knowing a gay or lesbian person makes a voter statistically more likely to support the freedom to marry. And I had a platform to come out in a way few others could — that is, fabulously, in a national newspaper — and in turn possibly affect positive change.
But the occasion demanded careful choreography. I struggled for a week to write my story, devoted a second to obsessively rewriting it, and a third still questioning if it was ultimately the wise course to take.
It wasn’t professionally prudent, I had finally resolved, but it was proper. I make no apologies for my politics, just as I make none for my faith. And yet I knew I owed an explanation — to gay and straight, to progressive and conservative — that it’s possible to be both gay and Republican.
But my fainthearted desire to make my awkward I-like-dudes debut in the relative obscurity of a hyperactive media environment was foiled: it was an uncommonly slow news cycle and the television gods required a sacrifice.
The column, “I’m a senior GOP spokesman, and I’m gay. Let me get married,” appeared on the website of the Post just before 8am Eastern. Within an hour, my voicemail and inbox were drowning in inquiries from reporters and bookers for radio and television.
Then came the articles, some generous and some decidedly less than. What had first percolated in gay-interest outlets had soon germinated the most significant of cable news outlets and papers. By noon I was a trending topic on CNN.
But after the articles came the commenters, and come by the thousands they did. I had girded myself against the possibility that my narrative might be met with intense hostility within my own party, particularly in religious quarters. Yet I was foolishly unprepared for the digital flogging I would endure courtesy of the perpetually aggrieved gay left.
I understood from the off that it was emotionally treacherous to subject myself to comments, but I pried anyhow. A choice sampling:
“Fuck this dude. Fuck anyone who works for the enemy for years, then wants to latch onto some of the hard-fought rights we won while fighting people like them and their bosses.”
“He should be embarrassed to be a Republican. He must have a strong internalized sense of homophobia and self-loathing.”
“I despise people like him…”
“Thanks for nothing you worthless quisling. Go crawl back under your rock.”
“He made his bed, let him burn in it. How for years he supports GOP thugs and soulless sociopaths! Now he wants to gets married..”
If I had not previously internalized self-loathing, the Internet saw to correct that.
To hear them tell it, I was a boot-licking sycophant who came out only after they, the courageously anonymous bellyachers of the Internet, had made it possible. Because of their dedicated comment board trolling, these proud civil rights heroes had made it possible that Uncle Toms such as myself might privately enjoy the movement’s successes while professionally profiting off its stumbles.
Now, that’s neither true nor fair.
I began writing in support of equality measures long before I came out professionally — some six years prior, in fact — and put pen to paper many times in the intervening period. That sustained activism eventually led me to serve as a Republican media consultant on United States v. Windsor, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision that rightly neutered the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
I was satisfied that I had done my part, sure in the knowledge that I had contributed in making America a little more free and fair.
No matter the facts, the Internet was unmoved. But even as the gay left marched into the square with flaming torches, I was receiving support from the unlikeliest of sources: senior Republicans.
Elected officials, party elders, and operatives today running the top GOP presidential campaigns all offered words of encouragement and congratulations. “Hang in there,” they told me, “you did the right thing.”
When the dust had settled, my career remained intact. No clients had decamped, no friends had bailed. And I was more confident than ever that it was possible to be both gay and Republican.
James Richardson is a former spokesman and adviser for the Republican National Committee and Governors Haley Barbour and Jon Huntsman.
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