They're gay, conservative and proud

NEW YORK — Even among the gays, the right is on the rise.

The broad surge in the conservative grassroots made it as far as PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s grand apartment overlooking New York’s Union Square Saturday night, where about 150 backers of the conservative gay group GOProud gathered to laugh at Ann Coulter’s red meat riffs on Democrats, blacks, and the Obamas at a fundraiser organizers touted as “Homocon.”


GOProud is the tea party of the gay rights movement, with well-tailored dark suits in place of revolutionary war garb. The event, complete with lithe young men in black “Freedom is Fabulous” t-shirts guiding guests to the elevator, marked a new high tide in the shift of the Republican Party away from “social issues” and toward a broader complaint about Democratic management of the economy, national security, and the idea of America. GOProud is an explicitly gay group that isn’t particularly focused on gay rights, and Coulter’s speech – full of conservative red meat, and only the occasional Judy Garland joke – reflected its focus.

The gay right is thriving at a moment that the mainstream gay rights movement faces a profound crisis.

The set of Washington-based establishment groups led by the Human Rights Campaign have close ties to the White House and have turned gay righs into a plan of the Democratic Party platform. But last week, a Democratic Congress failed to deliver on President Obama’s campaign promise to repeal the ban on gays in the military, and hasn’t even taken up his promise to repeal the federal ban on same-sex marriage. The realization that their alliance with the Democratic Party has – for the moment – failed to produce key policy shifts is producing a round of finger-pointing and bloodletting inside the traditional gay rights movement, with calls for resignations and turns toward the courts and toward civil disobedience.

The gay right, meanwhile, has taken its place at the vanguard. Former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman used his coming out as gay last month to raise more than $1 million for the legal effort, led in part by former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson, to win a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The plaintiffs in a California lawsuit in which a district court judge ruled “Don’t ask, don't tell” unconstitutional this year, meanwhile, were the Log Cabin Republicans. And even that traditional gay Republican group is struggling to rebuilt from an internal crisis, they – like establishment Republicans everywhere – face a challenge further right from the ascendant GOProud.

“We’re Joe Miller; Log Cabin is Lisa Murkowski,” said GOProud founder Chris Barron, dismissively. “We’re not interested in having a seat at the table as part of the establishment.”

Log Cabin, though, has also roiled the right this month, when National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (R-Texas) headlined a fundraiser for the group.

“Gay and lesbian voters are small-business owners, mothers and fathers, taxpayers who deserve representatives who will stand up for them and succeeding generations,” said its deputy executive director, Christian Berle.

Attendees at “Homocon” universally attributed the rise of the gay right to the rising conservative tide generally.

“It really was the economy stupid. There’s a move to the right in general,” said Thiel, who was also an early investor in Facebook and is a prominent supporter of libertarian causes. An awful lot of Republicans want to get out of the gay issue in general.”

Thiel compared the current gay rights’ strategy of allying itself with a single party to “trench warfare” in World War I, and argued that gay rights will benefit from a Republican Party that begins to compete for gay voters and donors.

Coulter’s presence at the event was controversial, as other gay activists pointed out that she’d made a series of anti-gay remark — she called former presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" — which she explained away at the top of her speech as humor.

“The people who get gay jokes are gays,” she said, adding that when she talks to Christian audience, “Out of sweetness they don’t laugh at the gay jokes.”

Coulter’s jokes Saturday riffed on the theme that GOProud doesn’t make same-sex marriage central to its appeal; it considers, Barron says, national security and the economy more important.

Marriage “is not a civil right – you’re not black,” Coulter said to nervous laughter. She went on to note that gays are among the wealthiest demographic groups in the country.

“Blacks must be looking at the gays saying, ‘Why can’t we be oppressed like that?’”

Coulter’s talk drew a mixed response, but her presence marked the increasingly mainstream Republican embrace of gay rights. Coulter had a falling out with a conservative website that has published her, WorldNetDaily, over her attendance. “She’s doing something important – she’s showing her base that it’s OK,” said one attendee, Michael Lucas. (Lucas also confided to a reporter, “I wonder what Ann will think about the fact that I am the biggest producer of gay porn on the East Coast and probably in the whole U.S.")

Attendees struggled to characterize the momentum they feel on the right at large and the gay rights in particular. One, radio host Tammy Bruce, who is on GOProud’s board, said the moment has the “same energy” as the radical ACT-UP protests in the 1980s, which drew attention to the AIDS crisis.

Another, former New York Log Cabin GOP chief Chris Taylor, said people are discovering what he’s always found self-evident: “I don’t see what being gay has to do with being socialist,” he said.

As for Coulter, she told POLITICO the embrace of gays on the right could only be reciprocated.

“Right wingers have always liked gays. Look at all of Ronald Reagan’s gay friends,” she said.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Ann Coulter suggested that former Sen. Joseph McCarthy was gay. Coulter says she did not intend to give that impression. The story also incorrectly reported when the Homocon fundraiser took place. It was on Saturday, Sept. 25th.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: MJ Lee @ 09/29/2010 12:30 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Anne Coulter suggested that former Sen. Joseph McCarthy was gay. Coulter says she did not intend to give that impression. The story also incorrectly reported when the Homocon fundraiser took place. It was on Saturday, Sept. 25th.