Kyle Munson

kmunson@dmreg.com

For Chadwick Moore, admitting he was a gay man to his “Fox News-watching, gun-toting Republican” dad in Iowa was a breeze compared to coming out as a conservative this year to his liberal friends in New York.

This is the 33-year-old University of Iowa alumnus whose Out Magazine profile of former Breitbart News provocateur and "Internet super villain" Milo Yiannopoulos inspired such outcry against Moore that it made him realize he had been living a lie: He now has more in common with the GOP.

He has been lambasted as a "fake conservative" and "attention whore" on social media. But he insists that his ideological shift was glacial and gradual, not sudden and opportunistic. Even in high school, Moore said, his senior AP English thesis was an argument against hate-crime legislation based on constitutional grounds.

"I'm not, like, an establishment Republican," he said. "I'm still very much the person I've always been. And I've never registered as a Democrat for that reason."

His world was simpler and more neatly defined in 2001, when Moore was a high school graduate en route to his freshman year at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He rode shotgun in his father’s pickup truck.

On the verge of dropping off his son into a teeming throng of 29,000 restless young coeds, Moore's father, Gary, finally broached the topic.

Well, his dad said, your sister told me something about you.

Moore had an inkling of what was next: Oh yeah?

She told me that you’re gay. Is that true?

Moore’s stomach suddenly was in knots. He already had come out to his liberal mom a few years earlier, with no problem. His parents are divorced; she lives in Nashville. But he was a little more daunted by his dad: a macho, cigar-chomping accountant, farmer and hunter in Oskaloosa.

Moore braced himself and answered: Yeah, it’s true.

Gary was quiet for a minute. Finally, he responded: Well, I guess I’m going to have to tell your boyfriends what I tell your sister’s boyfriends.

Moore, still apprehensive, suddenly was intensely curious: What’s that?

If you hurt my son I’ll...

To complete that sentence no doubt would offend some of you. Suffice it to say that Gary, to quote Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, was ready to "make 'em squeal" in defense of his son. Moore thanked his dad profusely for the sweetly protective sentiment.

That tender moment, if a bit raw, was a bridge between a father and son who, at the time, stood on opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Once ensconced at the U of I, Moore “became an immediate socialist,” he said. He marched and protested his way through college while decked out in a garish wardrobe of thrift store castoffs.

All the while, the identity crisis that seethed within Moore was not hormonal. It was ideological.

“Some people experiment with their sexuality in college,” he said. “I experimented with far-left politics.”

'Alienated and frightened'

Moore now lives in another liberal enclave — the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He has long since set aside his college dreams of becoming a fiction writer to establish himself as a legitimate working journalist.

His profile of Yiannopoulos was posted Sept. 21 in the publication catering to the LGBT community that serves an audience of a couple hundred thousand readers, on the eve of the bitter presidential election. The Breitbart editor had become a notorious figure thanks to his loud mouth and the rampant protests over his speeches on college campuses. (This was before Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart in reaction to the firestorm spurred by his comments that appeared to condone pedophilia.) Moore faced instant backlash from friends and strangers alike.

His editors went so far as to preface the profile with a lengthy disclaimer to distance themselves from Yiannopoulos’ views while simultaneously decrying “social media tribalism,” where “the mere act of covering a contentious person can be misrepresented as an endorsement.”

Moore kept getting the cold shoulder at his local gay bar. Good friends stopped calling. He had become a pariah.

"The gay community has been my entire life since I was 15," he said. "And I love the gay community. I love gay culture. I love drag queens. I love gay bars. It's been my everything, and now all that's gone. So, yeah, it's sad. I'm mourning the loss of that."

Fed up with all the backlash, Moore in February wrote a manifesto of sorts in the New York Post: “I’m a gay New Yorker – and I’m coming out as conservative.”

He criticized President Donald Trump for his travel ban and cabinet choices. But mostly the article served as a kiss-off to the left wing that had counted him as one of their own.

“All I had done was write a balanced story on an outspoken Trump supporter for a liberal, gay magazine,” he said, “and now I was being attacked. I felt alienated and frightened.”

“It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think,” he added. “And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.”

'It seems like if you choose a side, you’re ostracized'

Among those shocked by Moore's conservative coming out were two of his best friends and college classmates, a pair of women from Iowa.

Kat Durst, raised in Ottumwa and Davenport, met Moore on their first day in the college dorm, not long after the pivotal scene in the pickup truck with his father.

Today, she’s a 34-year-old real estate agent. She and her husband, a physician, are raising two kids, 3 and 5, in Gainesville, Fla. Moore was a bridesmaid in her 2010 wedding.

As Moore tangles with critics on Twitter, Durst fills her Facebook feed with liberal commentary fully in keeping with her former undergraduate self.

Durst can’t take the leap from Democratic socialist to conservatism with her friend, but that doesn't matter to her.

“Even the things that I thought he thought in college... He doesn’t owe that to me — to still think that — or owe it to anyone," she said.

A third friend entered their circle at the U of I when Haley Niichel spotted Moore in a computer lab clad in a white T-shirt, tight jeans and blue bandanna. She grew up in Orange City, the conservative stronghold of northwest Iowa. This was the first gay person she was aware of meeting.

Moore “knows how to kind of step on a nerve,” said Niichel, who now lives in West Des Moines. “He has that innate sense of going in for the kill. But I think he makes liberals really think about what they’re fighting for.”

Her job as a mortgage underwriter, as Niichel puts it, is to “document logic.” She wonders whether that helps makes her more of libertarian who falls on the political spectrum somewhere between her two friends.

“It seems like if you choose a side, you’re ostracized by the other side,” she said. “If you’re not super liberal, you’re a Republican in the liberals' eyes. If you’re not actively going to all these protests — in an aggressive, gnashing way — it’s not enough for them.”

Are we building bridges or silos?

Moore's paternal family roots in Iowa predate the Civil War. He was born in Tennessee and raised in Illinois.

I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up writing his gay, Midwestern variation on J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy," a New York Times bestselling account of the author's roots in white working-class Appalachia that has been embraced as a guide to the rural disaffection that helped Trump win the White House.

“I’ve always known these people,” Moore said of his conservative Midwestern friends and family. “I’ve always liked these people.”

Moore's dad said that he and his son always have been close and have shared quality political discussions.

"I probably disagree with everybody on certain things," Gary said. "Talk to me. I will listen. But don’t try to be overbearing and convince me that you’re right unless you can really have some facts to prove it."

Perhaps surprisingly, Moore in the recent election voted for Hillary Clinton — not Trump. He called it a “preemptive defense” against criticism from his liberal neighbors, when he still was worried about mending fences.

Moore's dilemma made me seek out one of Iowa's most prominent, stalwart gay activists: Donna Red Wing. She has fought for decades for gay rights. She's married to a woman. She recently stepped down as director of LGBTQ-advocacy group One Iowa and now directs the Eychaner Foundation that awards its own Matthew Shepard Scholarships.

Red Wing made headlines in recent years by partnering with somebody perceived as her nemesis: Bob Vander Plaats, whose Family Leader pushes the "family values" cause of evangelical conservatives and led the fight against same-sex marriage in Iowa. The unlikely pair turned their private coffee conversations into a public series of dialogues to make a point about the desperate need for civility in our polarized politics.

If not to the extent of Moore, both of them weathered criticism from their respective political camps for breaking bread with the "enemy." But Red Wing considers herself "old and cranky enough" that she's "tired of always making it one side or the other."

"Are we living in this community," she said, "or are we just building silos and living by ourselves?"

She added, "Our sexual orientation and gender identity really have little to do with where we are, in terms of being progressive and conservative."

Not that Red Wing is on the same page as Moore when it comes to Trump. He sees the president as opening up the GOP to new, more diverse voices. He sees the president's trolling of the media and his rivals as a necessary gambit to wrangle with entrenched forces.

"The most powerful institutions in our society are all toting the same narrative," he said, "and they're all left-leaning."

Red Wing, however, sees Trump promoting intolerance. She worries that his actions hampering, say, immigrants and Muslims all too easily may spread to the gay community, or already have through far-right forces grown more powerful in various courts and state and local offices.

I don't have easy answers about when to stand up and shout in protest versus when to sit quietly and talk, extending an olive branch. Both civility and protest, if we can apply them at the proper times, are crucial to our democracy.

I do know that Moore shouldn't have been spurned for writing his original profile of Yiannopoulus when he was simply doing his job as a journalist.

Because Red Wing's words echo in my head: Are we living in this community, or are we just building silos and living by ourselves?

As Gary put it, "I don't know if there’s ever going to be an answer" to our polarized politics. "All I can say is I hope people will listen."

If nothing else, Moore as an outed conservative has a lot more to discuss politically with his dad and his other Republican relatives in Iowa.

“If Trump does a good job," he said, "I’ll be very excited to vote for him in four years."

That may not be a rhetorical bomb on par with Yiannopoulos.

But it still won’t play very well in Brooklyn.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson).