What LGBTQ Republicans wish you understood

Corey Inganamort tells me that when he walks into a gay bar, he often feels marginalized and vulnerable — made to feel so by other patrons. It’s not because he’s gay — it’s because he’s conservative.

“In the community, if you were to go to a gay bar or gay club, if politics comes up, you’re pretty much shunned in silence,” Inganamort said.

Inganamort, 37, who grew up in Sparta, N.J., and graduated from the University of Delaware, is part of a community of LGBTQ conservatives who say the mainstream media, Democrats, and corporate America lump all members of the LGBTQ community together — with “woke corporations” being the worst. At the end of Pride month, he’s left feeling silenced and frustrated.

He is so angered by how woke corporations act, he named his sport pontoon boat “The No Woke Zone.”

Inganamort is tapping into a way of thinking that seems to be catching on: The LGBTQ political movement is stifling, silencing, and bullying members of its own community — something that Pride month is supposed to be fighting against.

The backlash against LGBTQ Republicans — similar to Black Republicans — is often vicious, cruel, and isolating.

I spoke to five openly LGBTQ conservatives with ties to the Philadelphia region who are so worried about repercussions from progressives and the LGBTQ movement at large that they stay politically closeted out of fear — a fear so deep that they would not allow me to publish their names nor speak on the record.

One person I texted with, a gay man who moved out of Pennsylvania, told me that despite once being an outspoken conservative and unabashed Donald Trump supporter, he now won’t speak up for fear he could lose his job. His bosses in the hospitality industry are fine with his sexuality, but he’s worried they might fire him if they knew he is conservative.

Is this the progress identity politics promised? George Orwell saw this coming in 1945 when he wrote Animal Farm. In it, the oppressed become the oppressors. Or to paraphrase Orwell, “All LGBTQ people are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Some LGBTQ conservatives are starting to push back. In 2019, former Democrat Rob Jordan launched a Philadelphia chapter of the nation’s oldest Republican LGBTQ organization, the Log Cabin Republicans.

“I just feel like you’re told in our community to think one way and to believe one thing — the Democratic liberal agenda,” Jordan told Inquirer reporter Julia Terruso at the time. “I just wanted there to be a venue, an avenue, for the other side to be heard, to try to address that imbalance.”

What do Inganamort, Jordan, and other LGBTQ conservatives want to talk about? The overreach of big government, lower taxes, safer communities, school choice, gun rights, and energy independence, for a start.

That’s why groups like Pink Pistols, an organization established to “teach queers to shoot,” was over 30,000 members strong in 2018 when it merged with Operation Blazing Sword, a program dedicated to firearm education, training, and support for the LGBTQ community. It’s also why the Log Cabin Republicans and its allies support a national platform that makes the case for strengthening the economy via the free market, for everyone’s benefit.

But good luck finding a mainstream media outlet or corporation that will elevate the voices of LGBTQ conservatives on any of these issues. This despite the fact that 37% of LGBTQ voters, according to a 2020 Williams Institute report, identify as either Republican or independent. One exit poll in 2020 found that 27% of LGBTQ voters voted for Trump. That’s up from 2012, when 22% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters supported Mitt Romney, and 2014, when 24% of those voters favored Republicans during midterms.

The LGBTQ political movement — along with the Democratic Party — has become hyper-focused on controlling the ideological narrative. So focused, in fact, that it ignores actual victories for the LGBTQ community if it comes at the hands of conservatives, like when Trump appointed the first openly gay cabinet member in Richard Grenell as director of national intelligence in 2020.

Many I spoke with told me they often get asked, “How can you be gay and conservative”? For Inganamort, the answer is easy: “A great economy and safe community is good for gay people, too. And frankly, only Republicans are able to deliver on those two.”

If the LGBTQ movement sincerely believes it stands for equal rights for all, it should deliver for LGBTQ conservatives, too.