Is Nick Fuentes gay?
A far-right extremist is oddly teasing
To look at right-wing culture from outside it, you’d see frequent anti-gay statements. To look closer, many figures are sexually ambiguous and teasing.
Consider Nick Fuentes, the far-right Catholic commentator who is often called a white nationalist. He is “fringe” and “extreme”—and a continuous conversation takes place around the puzzle of his sexuality.
Fuentes was born in 1998 and grew up in La Grange Park, Illinois, outside Chicago.
He’s Mexican on his father’s side and was raised Catholic. He lately emphasizes that he has been a lifelong incel—a brand he wears proudly—though with the brief lapse of once kissing a girl in high school.
He went to Boston University in 2016, to study international relations and political science, but spent more time getting started in right-wing media. Buoyed by the Donald Trump campaign, he launched a web T.V. show, America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes.
He was profiled in the Boston Globe in 2017, doing his show and “causin’ some mischief,” as he puts it. His thoughts on immigration?
“I want all of them out.”
He’s listed as 5'8" or 5'9" but is actually 5'6".
Nick Fuentes became the pint-sized far-right-wing doll. You pull his string and he says shocking things. He’s a white nationalist incel who likes Hitler!
And yet his values aren’t ever ordinary right-wing values. He likes to say he’s “never touched a woman in my life” and discusses himself as a “misogynist” who is uninterested in emotional or sexual contact with women. He is, as he says, “stone-cold to somebody.”
That doesn’t sound so right-wing.
Then this not-white man is off talking up white nationalism and Nazi Germany as some kind of ideal—all with a smile.
He can be “dangerous” and “scary” Nick Fuentes.
This mode can be photographed with just the right menacing suggestion. The smiles disappear. He seems the image of an American fascist youth leader, or something.
In this mode, he gets boosted by establishment media that is eager to link him to more prominent figures. He knows, that is, how to play the game of getting famous.
Most typically, he is impish and comic—and sexually ambiguous.
There was an infamous livestream in 2019 with ‘CatboyKami’, another right-wing operative, though the event looked oddly like a gay date.
Or were they just tweaking their fans?
Don’t think you’ll ever pin Nick down. He addressed the CatboyKami controversy in 2022, explaining that men can’t have “sex”—since it’s just “friction.”
As he evokes imagery like having sex with a pumpkin, it all becomes goofy and surreal.
He got banned from social media sites and turned it into a comedy.
Then there’s the game of guessing if a new account is “really” Nick Fuentes.
One apparent Instagram account was ‘bossbabyincel2’ — which observers noticed was following a gay account.
Is he into trans porn?
That was another Fuentes experience in 2022, when he was streaming from his phone and his browser windows were briefly in view.
One of them was identified by eager onlookers as a video he wouldn’t have wanted to share publicly: “Tgirl sucking a femboy’s dick and then he jerks until cum.”
Nick was into…that?
But his social circle did seem…gayish?
With a range of apparent friends, including gay-to-ex-gay Milo Yiannopoulos and still-gay Ali Alexander, who was later exposed as an actual sexual predator, Fuentes’ vibe is never so heterosexual.
But Fuentes evades any real scrutiny. He understood his audience’s real interest wasn’t right-wing politics, but a performance that was curiously childish, perverse, and not at all driven by the movement’s apparent values.
Fans might ask about his sexuality—but not really care.
The thrill of being part of his online community, the “Groypers” or the “Groyper Army,” is the fiction of being pioneers of a new right-wing sensibility, and ready to take on the leftist assaults.
Fuentes and his followers are talked up in the media as “America’s Homegrown Jihadists,” even as the experience of being in that media space is kooky, quirky and queer.
It’s a theater of performing men that they are not.
Will he just say if he’s gay or not?
The other day, George Santos, the gay ex-Congressman, took advantage of a Fuentes appearance on an X ‘space’ to pop the question.
Fuentes talked around it. Days later, he accidentally streamed gay porn. Or did he? He says he was hacked. His followers may accept the “explanation.” It’s all a part of the fun. 🔶
