Young Gay Republicans Are Trying to Change Their Party’s View on LGBT Rights

Pictured: Chrys Kefalas is a Senate candidate.

It’s no secret that millennials are more vocal and frank about what they want than past generations have been. Once they were publicly branded as the “me” generation, they decided to run with it and own that label.

Now, in the midst of campaign season for the 2016 presidential election, and after a year of historic advancements for gay rights, young Republicans have their work cut out for them when it comes to presenting an overall positive voice for their party. Vanity Fair spoke with some of the fresh faces trying to elasticize the rigid beliefs and views that the upper and elder echelons of the Republican Party have, especially when it comes to gay rights and the right to marry.

“This is an issue of mass and manners,” says S.E. Cupp, a self-described Log Cabin Republican who became a viral sensation when she grew emotional in a CNN interview following the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage. (“Those people . . . are patriots,” a teary-eyed Cupp said of gay-marriage advocates.) “On the mass side, the country just doesn’t agree with you anymore and I don’t think that’s going to [change]. So, just from the math you have to understand: you’re an outlier. “And then on the manners, you have to understand that people like me, people who are supportive of gay rights and conservative or [who are] gay themselves, they’re fighting doubly hard to advance conservative values,” Cupp says. “We shouldn’t be kicked out of the party, or castigated, or called anti-conservative because we hold these views.”

But small divisions of the party aren’t the only ones pushing for an image overhaul. A Senate candidate from Maryland, Chrysovalantis Kefalas (pictured above) could become the first openly gay Republican congressman to be elected, and he said, “The context in which I view individual liberty is that it comes down to: How do we provide an environment and climate when people can do their best work?” A fair question, especially considering Barack Obama has relied heavily on younger voters in both of his campaigns, and all the current GOP frontrunners seem to be doing is alienating a huge portion of that voting bloc.

But after all is said and done, the younger Republicans who will be the face of their party in the next election all agree that same-sex marriage will be old news — and no longer a sticking point.

Read Vanity Fair’s article here.