For far too long, being gay or lesbian has been tied to liberalism. Finally, that paradigm is shifting as more of the gay community refuses to be lectured by Democrats that we MUST vote the way they do if we "care about our own interests." Those interests, it turns out, are as diverse as the gay population itself. Homosexuals aren't a monolith, and despite the Democratic Party's presumption to speak for all of us, they most certainly do not.

The gay conservative movement has grown exponentially over the last several decades, with a major uptick since Donald Trump entered the political scene in 2015. By 2020, one survey found 45% of gay men planned to cast their vote for the "mean Tweeter" that election year. Perhaps it wasn't lost on them that Trump appointed the nation's first gay cabinet member, Richard Grenell, as Director of National Intelligence that same year. But it's more likely that they had simply turned off CNN.

It's not that gay Republicans weren't always around, or engaged. We've been active in the GOP for a long time, and especially since the 1970s founding of Log Cabin Republicans, the nation's oldest and largest gay political organization. For a bit of history, Log Cabin helped strike down 'don't ask, don't tell' laws in the military in 2010. Decades earlier, in 1978, aided by Ronald Reagan, the organization managed to defeat the Briggs Initiative, which would have prevented homosexuals from teaching in public schools. (The initiative was ultimately declared unconstitutional). But even with this important work, gay Republicans have for the most part been a minority within a minority, often drowned out by the other side, and merely tolerated or ignored by our own party. That is no longer the case.