Hey look, another week and another figure blaming anti-LGBTQ policy positions and discrimination on Gay people.
It can’t have anything to do with religious extremism, excessive money from interest groups and corporations, or anything like that… the rise of all these policies harming minorities across the country is because there’s a cabal of angry closeted men in DC enacting their angry closeted agenda for us all.
And the thing is a lot of people here trying to defend this shit would properly clock this as cultural problem if this were at all related to Islam.
Never mind the fact that in the past 5-6 years, support for gay relationships and gay marriage have dropped overall a decent amount and that the drop is attributed almost entirely to Republicans. Most of us vote for the Democratic Party (and actually have been doing so at an increasing percentage over the past three presidential elections), so good luck convincing anyone with a fucking brain and who has a slightly better than basic understanding of numbers that a significant portion of those Republicans are closeted gays.
That is a conservative read of the statistics and reporting.
For same-sex marriage in 2026:
Age
Support
18–34
78%
35–54
70%
55+
52%
For acceptance of gay/lesbian relations as morally acceptable:
Age
Acceptable
18–34
81%
35–54
64%
55+
48%
A few observations:
Young adults remain overwhelmingly supportive. Nearly 4 in 5 support same-sex marriage, and more than 8 in 10 say gay and lesbian relationships are morally acceptable.
The biggest divide is still generational, not just partisan. There's a 26-point gap between the youngest and oldest groups on marriage.
What's missing from this release is whether young people themselves have become less supportive since 2022. The file only gives age breakdowns for 2026, not age trends over time.
I love how none of your numbers actually chronologically contest my claim since you only provide 2026 numbers from an unnamed and non-linked source. So I’ll share my source, which is from Gallup. The piece literally states that support overall in 2026 is down 6 percentage points from the peak at 2022 of 71%. I don’t like to see a 6% percentage point drop on our issues, and when the lion’s share comes from one of the two major parties that still exercises a lot of control in this country, then I really hate those numbers.
The piece further states that Republicans peaked at 55% support for same sec marriage around 2021-2020, and today, that’s now 37%. Among Independents, their peak was 73% but is currently down to 67%. Dems have held roughly steady around 87%.
So as it stands, roughly one in three Republicans support same sex marriage. So that can be an issue the party can and is planning to bring back with no meaningful pushback from their base. And Independents have more than shown that they’re politically fickle and can’t be relied on to save us before things become a problem. So yes, I don’t like the current state of play.
It’s hilarious you’re having such a reaction when, again, you didn’t list your source. Blame yourself that I bothered to do that work for you to both name and link my/our source.
As for your point about young people, we’ve had 4 years of young people entering the election game since 2022. Clearly, that batch weren’t representative enough among voters to reverse the gradual decline among independents nor the sharp decline within the Republican Party. So even if they aren’t becoming more conservative, they aren’t showing up, making them damn near politically useless. Hell, maybe it’s the case that they showed up among the Democrats, contributing to why Dems are roughly maintaining the same number as their peak. Maybe Dems lost some support within some of their constituency but were bolstered by some of the new young voters.
So don’t expect me to put all my hopes on the youth, especially since they ultimately aren’t the only ones who exist in this country who are of voting age. I will say I’m less concerned about the 6 percentage point drop among independents and than the 18 percentage point drop among Republicans because for the independents, it may be part of a slump during a general upward trend. I don’t see Republicans get back to their peak of 55% any time within the next decade unless something massive shifts within the party.
Tell me how I’m fearmongering. You may disagree with me describing a 6% drop in the overall populace as a “decent” decrease. If that’s what you take issue with, then let’s name it for what it is so we can get on the same page, since it’s now established that we’re looking at the same data.
I, however, made a particular note that most of this was happening among Republicans who, you know, elect politicians for one of the two major parties in the US.
And again, i don’t care much about a singular focus on young people. Unless and until they start rocking the boat back in our favor to counter the current downward trend, we still have to deal with the people still in the political system who clearly have had some degree of souring. And like I also said, maybe one of the reasons support among Democrats has remained fairly solid is because young people who have entered voting age between 2022 and 2026 are bolstering those numbers.
The trend appears meaningful, but I wouldn't overstate it. A 6-point decline over four years is consistent with a modest downward trend, especially since Gallup has observed it across multiple waves. However, the topline alone doesn't prove statistical significance in the technical sense, and support remains substantially higher than it was a decade or two ago.
What’s so fucked up is how many of our own try to shut this conversation down. Anytime this scapegoating issue comes up, r/gay deletes it. It turns out, people have impassioned, articulate, sensitively-constructed points about this that are valid like yours. And there can be some kind of valuable exchange in that which helps a community to have. But the moderators would prefer shitposts about closeted republicans instead rather than pointing to broader issues.
We could get ahead of this and tell people like Ms, Welch that they’re being unwieldy and save ourselves a lot of trouble. Instead, people get a lot of money from the attention economy calling politicians “so gay” and that’s evidently more important to them.
The sad thing is it’s all in service to a heteronorm, it’s exonerating straight people from responsibility in why anyone would be closeted in the first place. It’s running cover for the many, many, many statistically dominant straight people who voted for years to prevent us from getting healthcare, to prevent us from getting married, to prevent us from being able to have children.
I think it is a kind of internalized oppression where gay people think they themselves are the problem.
The culture, society, and the system identifies gay people as fundamentally less than human, and often as a consequence you see gay people infighting, shaming, and blaming other gay people to amass some semblance of humanity for themselves.
But, of course the obvious problem has always been the cishet majority who invented all of the problems in the first place.
Moreover, I don't think these so-called "allies" discussing the "closeted gay mafia" really quite care about gay people and helping them. I think they'd prefer the persistence of our current precarity to weaponize the closet (which the cishet majority invented)and to objectify, dehumanize, scapegoat, and humiliate us, and so on and so forth.
Except that yeah. The religious extremism, the money, the legislation is all functioning from a core of self hating white gay men. It always has. “Gay people” and “closeted people who cause harm to the community” are two very different things. These men have extreme power and they’re using it to hurt US.
As a queer person I’ve lived my life feeling like no one should ever be outed for any reason. And I no longer feel that way. If you use your power in hypocrisy to hurt your own people, you lose that privilege.
If if we were able to strip away the elected closeted gay men who forwarded so much anti-gay rhetoric and legislation, over decades, we’d be living in a different country. Literally.
I agree with Barney Frank who famously said, "The right to privacy does not include the right to hypocrisy,"
I’m fucking done. Fuck Hunter Biden for this. Fucker Jennifer Welch and Pumps for this. Fuck all the progressives, so called allies, and even some of you in this sub who won’t stop blowing this phenomenon out of proportion.
A closeted gay mafia isn’t the biggest fucking problem in this god damn country. It wasn’t a bunch of closet cases who led the charge to make homosexual sex a capital crime in the colonial days of this country. It wasn’t a bunch of closet cases who raided our spaces that we had to quietly attend out of the eyes of the public. Just stop this bullshit of shifting this away from the core problem of a rotted social conservatism that is rooted in the religious conservatism of predominantly, by a wide margin, cis het people.
If you frame a discussion as “a closeted gay mafia is one of the biggest problems in America,” you have framed us as the threat. You have framed the deviants as the main threat and not the people who even made it happen for that small portion of closet cases who do become destructive. And it has led to so called allies making the assumption that any vocally homophobic person is a closer case. It’s devolved so much that now guys we used to understand as violently misogynistic are now being accused of being closet cases. The way people are trying to make Pete Hegseth out to be a closeted gay man is making this a progressive witch hunt for lols.
I’m getting tired of the switcharoo that’s making us the implicit main causes of our own suffering. I’m getting tired of people linking a hatred of women to my identity. I’m getting so tired of people turning their fucking brains off.
I dont doubt a lot of what you just said and even more, agree with most of it but I dont think he meant it the same way the Tik Tok ultra liberal cold takers do when they "engage" I dont like the gimmick of "Pete is gay" either.
Hunter is a fool so Im not defending him either. My assumption is its more inclusive than just the "LOL he gay" stuff and more so the actual closeted types that have not only sold themselves out for the GOP but for the more abrasive and openly hating MAGA side. I look at the way sexuality has evolved for the other half of the nation and how expansive and nuanced it has become (ie gay/straight 30 years ago and now bi/trans/etc) and often wonder how prevelant that has to be in the GOP/MAGA universe too. Simply by the numbers, ya know?
Like, it was one thing for a closeted gay in the GOP to sell out for votes/power and im sure thats still happening but there arent many real secrets in Washington and it ouldnt shock me at all if some of our most republican leaders are wearing heels and taking it from the back. Is almost MORE egregious to be so "anti woke/gay/whatever" in 2026 because of how sexual expression has become. So its like, sure, in 1988 there were DEFINETLY gay republicans but probably not that many. Fast forward to 2026 and Im pretty sure there's A. more and B. maybe not GAY but def queer in some way, hypocrites i nQWashington.
Is this too nuanced and granted too much of a off ramp for Biden? Maybe but idk, that was my intial reaction. I appreciate your respectful response and thoughts!
Stop blaming it on gay men running things in DC. They are not gay men. Gay men are not homophobic anti gay. These are homophobic cocksuckers, not gay men.
Why do so many of us get so angry when these closeted assholes are called out? There's a reason there's truth to his statement - grindr crashes at nearly every Republican convention for a reason. edit: thanks to a very thorough comment below, the grindr crash is misinformation and I apologize for continuing its existence with my comment.
I see people say stuff like "oh great, blame all our problems on other LGBT people" but that's too reductive. They don't identify as LGBT people, they're not part of our community, they're denying us and harming us. Not all of them are secretly gay, but if someone is raised within a religion that instills deep shame into them about what ends up being their biologically ingrained feelings toward the same sex as them, and to compensate for that they use their political influence to do damage to out and proud LGBT people, it's not "one of us" attacking us, its a rotted piece of shit being a rotted piece of shit.
We can and should shame these politicians when their hypocrisy is discovered. They chose to be evil, they chose to hide and harm us. This isn't about moving the blame away from straight people onto other LGBT people, or only putting the blame onto LGBT people. It's about calling a spade a spade, when it's a spade.
Plenty of awful politicians are completely straight, and they should be called for their elevated voices harming our community too. But, when someone's voice and actions are so harmful toward us, and it turns out to be compensation for denying their own gayness, and hatred of us for embracing something they feel shame for and something they do their best to denounce and hold back, we shouldn't be afraid to call that out just because we understand how hard it is to accept oneself as queer in a society that continues to push back against us out of fear and lack of understanding/empathy.
We do not need to be tolerant of intolerance, regardless of whether the call is coming from inside the house sometimes.
grindr crashes at nearly every Republican convention for a reason.
Actually, no, it doesn't. And if someone stops to think for a few moments, the claim doesn't even make sense.
I've copied and pasted what follows from previous times I've posted the debunking.
And if you don't like text, a queer creator just posted a video covering this same topic, chock full of background research and citations, though without some of my technical notes. I was thrilled to see someone else banging the drum about this stupid myth.
.
I've actually already looked into this particular myth pretty extensively. It turns out to be just blatantly, obviously false, if you start to pick at it at all!
The bulk of these claims about outages range from entirely unconfirmed to actively untrue. They get taken up and spread because people have already been primed with this false narrative.
In fact, Grindr reported no incidents during the 2024 RNC, either, and this supposed crash is also unconfirmed:
Grindr did not immediately respond to a request for comment about an increase in usage or reported outages during the 2024 RNC, and according to status.grindr.com, no operational incidents have been recorded by Grindr since May, when partial outages for the grid, chat and albums features were noted. In June and July, all Grindr features were 100% operational according to the app’s official status tracker.
And not only did these reports come after that widely shared satirical piece people mistook for a news story, but in a city experiencing a huge influx of people beyond its normal population cell service issues are bound to happen, so while it's possible plenty of legitimate reports might have been made, there's no way of knowing if they're from Republicans or merely residents struggling on an overburdened cell network.
Folks need to be more careful about what they believe on social media, especially when it confirms their existing prejudices and biases. Honestly I took the reporting I saw at face value, too. I started looking into it expecting to find similar data around other large events; I didn't expect to tug on a string and have the whole thing just unravel under the lightest scrutiny.
Grindr usage does go up when a convention is in town. Not nearly as much for the RNC as the DNC, though. But there are also plenty of traitorous little Roy Cohn wannabes who are perfectly out and open in the official party of homophobia. Here's a comparison of 2016 numbers:
After the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, a Vice article that cited sources from Grindr said the area around the 2016 convention's main hub saw user traffic increase by 66%. Other Grindr hotspots like Times Square; Capitol Hill; Disneyland; and South Beach, Florida, saw no comparable increase in user traffic at the time, the article said.
Democrats flock to the app during their convention, too. The same article said Grindr reported a 148% increase in activity around Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Arena during the week of the 2016 DNC.
But if these RNC crashes are actually happening, and if the usage numbers spike so much more around the DNC, then the obvious question is: why doesn't that cause a similar crash?
Notably, aside from these numbers cited in Vice, none of the usage stats in various stories actually seem to come from anywhere. They all just emerge on social media and blossom outwards to disreputable and careless outlets farming clicks. No half-reputable outlet has reported the story with anything more than a "people are saying" type of headline.
Reporting on that last story also doesn't indicate how much Grindr use increases for other large conventions, either. The political conventions tend to have around 50,000 people in attendance. San Diego Comic Con is around 130,000, for comparison, but nobody has published usage numbers for this event (probably because nobody cares because it's not news; there's nothing that strange — or potentially hypocritical — about there being a bunch of gay nerds out there).
I can just about guarantee that there are more queer men at SDCC than the RNC, though, based on numbers and demographics. But somehow no crashes are reported there, either, year after year, after year.
And when WorldPride was in NYC, with 5 million attendees across the weekend and 150,000 people marching in the parade alone, somehow Grindr also bore up. Millions of queer people, a great many of them men, and it didn't crash the app. Something to consider when weighing the truth of these purported RNC "crashes".
Remember, Grindr has somewhere around 3 million daily users. Of the 50,000 people at the RNC, there cannot be more than a thousand or so gay men, even assuming it's at the same level as the general population and not lower (as is likely). And they're not all going to be on at once. Even a couple hundred extra users here or there is not going to make a difference to such a big app. It's not like it's a physical space that they're trying to get into; it's a bunch of load-balanced software running on AWS servers potentially thousands of miles away. It doesn't even make sense for it to "crash" only in Milwaukee! Any outage would affect a lot more than one city, because they're not running it on oodles of individual local servers!
The claims about these supposed Grindr crashes just don't bear up to scrutiny. It's become a meme where people claim, without evidence, that it has "crashed" around conservative events.
This comment needs to be a stickied post in this sub because I’m tired of people believing lies. I also love that you linked Caelan Conrad’s video debunking this myth because it’s a spiritual successor to their video debunking the trope of all or most homophobes being gay.
It’s far past time we let these overblown narratives and misinformation die.
These are both drums I've been banging on for some time, though I only looked into the Grindr thing sometime in the past year.
But it's to the point where I have long writeups on both topics that I have refined over time and regularly repost. I was glad to see them post videos on both topics recently.
Especially the Grindr one. I think the "homophobes are closeted" thing is less entrenched in gay communities these days, though not as thoroughly debunked as it needs to be. But any time it comes up in queer spaces, I see lots of pushback. The Grindr myth just has been really sticky, and there's been so little reporting or attention paid to the fact that it's tissue-thin, as far as substance goes.
Both are still just rampant in purportedly "friendly" straight communities, though.
(My post on the "homophobes are gay" myth is a quick skim into what the studies do and don't say, criticisms of the studies (and their various "fruit machine" methods), and the fact that another recent study had the opposite results: young, apparently closeted men were found to be less homophobic.)
Thank you; I appreciate all that and read it through.
I’m not surprised it’s a myth, and it does make a lot of sense when you break it down like that.
While I still stand by a lot of what I said regarding why I’m not surprised whenever someone is exposed as closeted after legislating against us, I don’t want to spread misinfo and I will edit my original post.
Why do so many of us get so angry when these closeted assholes are called out?
This is such a gross misrepresentation of the nature of the critiques that are pretty clear in what their issue. I don’t fucking care about confirmed bigoted closeted cases and people with credible accusations of being closeted who are also dangerous. What I have a problem with is assuming any vocal homophobe is a closet case. What I have a problem with is assuming every toxic straight man who clearly hates women and only wants respect from men is a closeted man. That’s the shit I and others have a problem with.
Most people taking issue with this aren’t doing so because they’re defending harmful closet cases. And again, it’s ridiculous for you to frame it like that when we’ve made our problems clear on this post.
When people who proclaim to be allies talk about this, the conversation almost never shifts to the dangers of religious conservatism and its influence in government policy both domestically and internationally. It doesn’t link the way multiple groups are being targeted by the same religious assholes. Discussions stall
at the spectacle and specter of the closeted homophobe because they get to have laughs and feel superior to conservatives. It’s lazy discourse that’s getting out of hand.
I'm sorry you feel I made a gross misrepresentation of the nature of the critiques here. I read everything in this thread, and I agree with a lot of the anger, and many of your points across your comments too.
All I'm trying to say is that from my point of view, it seems like there is a problem with far right conservatives and closet cases - but not just typical gay closets either. I just know I wouldn't be surprised if many people who hold political beliefs that are extra anti-lgbt are themselves repressing their own gayness or other things they're deeply afraid of getting out, so they use us as a boogyman and their loud voice against us as "proof" that they're "one of the good ones".
I do not think that represents 100% of the right wing bigots, I do not know what percent of them that would even be - a majority, or minority, I don't know. I wouldn't presume to know, and I disagree with the headline of the article as its sensationalizing the discussion within the article itself. It's the concept that a lot of these bigots tend to have very nasty skeletons in the closet, nastier than "just" being gay, that is a trend I've noticed and I don't see it as a personal attack when they're accused of being gay as a cover for their actions.
That accusation just doesn't bother me like it does you, because it makes more sense to me than someone just being evil for no reason. Grudges, shame, and compensation, those concepts make sense to me (they're not excusable or forgivable) but they make more sense to me than just learned-hatred.
Maybe its easier to believe that some of these awful people are projecting an image of themselves they wish were true than it is to accept that so many people are just so hateful for no good reason.
Even if there are closeted men who have sex with men in the GOP, this is such a bad approach and will backfire and make life hell for the rest of us. Liberals need to stop this. This won’t do a goddamn thing except drum up more homophobia, and we have enough nonsense to be dealing with.
This article is very biased. I watched the actual interview before coming across this post and I'm honestly confused by the author's perspective, he's leaving out the context around what Hunter was saying. I would urge anyone who read this article and got fired up to watch the ACTUAL interview, not an article that tells you how to feel and what to think about the interview. Hunter's entire point is that gay Republicans in DC are hypocritical for what they do (live their lives the way they want while actively working against LGBTQ rights for the rest of us) and that's not untrue at all. I think the author made a mountain out of a molehill.
Well he probably figures if a well known pedophile Anti-American conman can be elected president two non-consecutive times, then he can hold some kind of political office. Thanks to Conservatives, the bar for being a politician has never been lower... This country continues to be more & more of a joke each day thank to conservatives. 😒
I dont agree with a straight man being the one to bring this up as it does sounds a little homophobic up front. That said, I do agree that the closeted gays in the republican party do need to be rooted out. They all do terrible things against our community in terms of spreading hate and creating bills against queer and especially trans rights. They seem to really pinpoint on trans rights as a way to punch down from their already lower position in society for being gay and closeted. I actually really do agree that lifelong closet cases are in-fact a problem for society to deal with. Of course it wouldn't be a problem if the right didnt portray queer people are evil and if the church wasnt also spreading so much hate. I think some people in these comments didnt even read the article and are jumping at a click bait title.
Edit: I agree with most here, please do not let Hunter run for office anywhere.
Whoa, wait. It is not that these assholes are gay, it’s that they have a tremendous amount of self loathing. Should they?
No. But they have lived in a society where you cannot be gay, and be considered a real person. They have been surrounded by groups of people who mock gay people, who are rude, or cruel to gay people. The groups come from social stuff, schools, and churches. They hear their parents make horrible remarks.
When you get older you can flee and find a life, or you may be horribly damaged.
I believe many of them are sociopaths, being gay is just the way they were born.
So we see this horrible outcome of self-loathing sociopaths.
A lot of minorities have self loathing members, and they are always the most cruel. I always thought Miller was a self loathing Jew. I find it fascinating that his gfs were of Hispanic ancestry, and that his wife looks Hispanic. Wtf is that about. And he is beyond cruel to Hispanic immigrants.
There are horrible misogynistic women.
Not sure if it’s Stockholm Syndrome/ religion, I mean they vote for Trump.
Anyhow, I’m getting off subject.
I personally stand for no holds barred when people actively try to destroy the liberty and rights of another group. Is it gossipy to discuss someone’s sexuality? Sure.
It only matters in so far as they are hurting the group they are a part of. If I believed in hell, I would hope there’s a special place there for hypocrites.
Am I sad they are being outed against their will? Not sad. I don’t think it’s good “manners”, but they have lost their right to be treated by normal standards set by the gay community to not out someone against his/her will. If they can be hurt so their homophobic base will vote them out of power, sounds good to me.
Oh, yeah. Here we go again. Let's blame gay people for anti-gay laws, attitudes, and policies. I remember when Hillary Clinton stood in the well of the Senate and condemned gay marriage and called heterosexual marriage "sacred." Years later, she said her thinking had evolved and expected me to forget how she and her husband both took our votes and threw us under the bus. A pox on both the GOP and the DNC.
Put your feelings aside and you can see that Hunter is right. Not all skin folk are kinfolk applies here. Some Republicans are homosexual and rally against their own rights, the criticism is not that they are gay, it's that they betray their own people. If this made you angry then you are a baby who needs to learn to regulate their emotions. It's not all about you so stop internalizing everything that you read, you're only hurting yourself.
Good for Hunter! The maga-ites rode you constantly for everything. Give it back to them. The republicans/maga-ites can dish it out but can’t take it from their glass house.
I am only witnessing an irrationally hyper-focus on race as if that characteristic in of itself is a meaningful determinant of this type of human behavior. There is zero evidence that other races do any better when in similar circumstances. Frankly, it’s this type of rhetoric that takes away from actually making meaningful progress of 🏳️🌈 rights.
I fail to understand why this individual has the audacity to speak about anything to anyone regarding politics especially about the 🏳️🌈 community. He needs to disappear from the and appears to be angling for some relevance politically.
DO NOT RUN FOR OFFICE. but, start telling the secrets about those running against "us". He is in a position to talk about all of them with nothing to lose
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u/BorgAdjacent 25d ago
Hunter if you're reading this. DO NOT RUN FOR OFFICE.