Nearly 100 days into Trump’s term, these gay Republican activists had a chance to assess their success. Or they could make fun of people.

BuzzFeed News / Dominic Holden

A forum at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City on Thursday night was billed as an "all-star" collection of activists in the "new gay movement in the Republican Party." And indeed, panelists inside the tony brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side were among the country’s most notable conservative gay-rights activists. But rather than detail how they were building a new movement — or discuss their influence in the nascent Trump administration — the gay men on stage spent most of two hours ridiculing the left while peppering their speeches with cheap cracks about transgender people. They mocked President Obama’s LGBT liaison as "the most unattractive tranny," joked that Caitlyn Jenner hadn't had "the operation," and said Obama-era rules to protect transgender students were “horrifying.” People of color and women fared little better with the all-white, five-member panel. One claimed the gender wage gap was "a total fucking myth," while another opined that black people don't face oppression because they aren't enslaved. Then he laughed about adopted Asian babies. Above it all, the panelists — who ranged from journalists to political operatives — chastised a culture of political correctness and “fetishizing” identity, arguing that liberals have cried wolf at the Trump administration and lost credibility. They praised a clear cultural shift among conservatives to be more tolerant of LGBT people. And while they shrugged off legal protections for transgender people, they were confident guys like them are at home in the Republican fold. Over the past year, BuzzFeed News has chronicled the rise of gay conservatives, from a frenzy during the Trump campaign to their cocky attitudes during the transition. They clinked champagne glasses at a “Gays for Trump DeploraBall” on Inauguration Day. They were faithful Trump, who has both supported and opposed marriage equality, could lay out a welcome mat for gay Republicans unlike any president before. This week, nearly 100 days into Trump’s term, these gay Republican activists had a chance to assess their success. Or they could make fun of people.

BuzzFeed News /Dominic Holden

Jeff Goolsby, the forum’s moderator and the secretary of the Metropolitan Republican Club, kicked off the night with a few jokes. “Some people might say, 'Hey, you have four white, maybe rich, guys on your panel,'” he said. “Listen, I am not going to assume any of their genders. Just kidding.”

“Caitlyn Jenner said she can’t do it until after the operation,” he continued, to hoots of laughter. To illustrate the left’s knee-jerk histrionics over Trump, Lucian Wintrich, who led a project during the campaign called Twinks for Trump, blasted Obama's LGBT liaison — a transgender woman named Raffi Freedman-Gurspan. “Begrudgingly, I’ll say ‘she,’” said Wintrich, implying that he didn’t consider her a woman. He went on to call her “the most unattractive tranny," a line that cast the packed room of Republicans into guffaws under golden chandeliers and star-spangled bunting. His point was that Freedman-Gurspan only held the position for a few months, he said, so progressives were overreacting when Trump didn’t appoint a replacement liaison. “A lot of people will say, 'I guess we had this bureaucrat who was fighting for a couple weeks before Obama left office.'” But Wintrich, who is also a White House correspondent for the alt-right site Gateway Pundit, neglected to mention that Obama actually had an LGBT liaison since 2014 — which undermines his claim the position had only been around “a couple weeks.” “Now we have to talk about trans bathrooms,” jumped in Chadwick Moore, a former writer for Out magazine who was excoriated online for writing a soft-focus profile about Milo Yiannopoulos last year. Afterward, he came out as a Republican in the New York Post. Moore said guidance to protect transgender students issued by the Obama administration was “horrifying” because, he claimed, “it turned every bathroom and every locker room in the country gender-neutral.” “So of course Donald Trump took that away,” said Moore, lauding the president for reversing the policy. “It shouldn’t be there. We’re going have trans kids taking dumps in the streets? What were they doing before Obama did this?” Rather than criticize the president — as groups on the left did when he withdrew the transgender guidance — the men argued that Trump has been a paragon for LGBT rights, in large part because he carried a pride flag on the campaign trail and said after the election that marriage equality is settled law. Gregory T. Angelo, the head of the venerable Log Cabin Republicans, sought to demonstrate that he was a Republican above all else by condemning “radical Islamic terrorism” and Obamacare. “Who told gay people that the only issues you can care about are marriage and LGBT nondiscrimination laws?” he said, pivoting to his political priorities. “If you are a gay individual, you should be very concerned about the Second Amendment rights to protect yourself by bearing firearms. Be concerned about radical Islamic terrorism and the threat that it poses to LGBT individuals…and Democrats ignore that.”

BuzzFeed News / Dominic Holden

Angelo smiled through much of the panel, yet he sat stoically amid the anti-transgender comments, but he never condemned them. However, he also boasted that Trump has given license for Republicans to speak more freely. “We have Donald Trump to thank for eviscerating this politically correct culture,” he said. The Republican Party — not Democrats — “value people of all sexual orientations and gender identity.” Wintrich added, “Islam inherently hates gay people. They hate Christians. They hate Western culture. They don’t understand why every woman in here isn’t wearing a polyester blanket.”

Sweeping criticism of Islam is familiar ground for gay Republicans, including Peter Boykin, the head of Gays for Trump, which tweeted recently that gay men should abandon transgender people politically and that “Islam is a cancerous cult of murder.”

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@dominicholden @YoungDems4Trump I'm Not really anti-Muslim there is a small amount of good ones the rest haven't ki… https://t.co/Wxc91dq83e