00:07:27.540Oh, my God. Well, I mean, I think he's somebody either you are obsessed with him like I am or you've never heard of him ever.
00:07:36.800You know, it's like it could go either way.
00:07:39.960Exactly. I'm so excited you brought this up because this is exactly where I wanted to start.
00:07:45.400Before we can get into Lindsey Graham, I feel. Lindsey Graham, who spent, you know, the last decade of his life worshipping Trump and doing everything he could to be on Donald Trump's good side.
00:08:00.200It's interesting because Donald Trump is in some ways sandwiched between various powerful gay men, both that follow him and that he followed.
00:08:10.620And not enough people know that Donald Trump's mentor and the reason that Donald Trump is the way that he is and operates the way that he operates is because of one of those gay men named Roy Cohn.
00:08:24.920Roy Cohn, and here's where I'm going to let you fill in a lot of the blanks, but he was a lawyer in I think like the 50s to the 70s. He was responsible for the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in a trial that most legal experts say now was marred by Roy's prosecutorial misconduct because he wanted that couple dead. And he succeeded in that.
00:08:50.900And I know that he he was a man of many secrets, secrets that he lived and died by.
00:08:56.260And I also think that in many ways, though Roy was a pitiful figure that you're about to explain, I think Lindsay wishes he could have had some of the things that Roy had.
00:09:06.840I think that's a really great way to frame it.
00:09:09.900The simple way to talk about what Roy Cohn did was to say that he was a lawyer.
00:09:14.980Right. But saying that Roy Cohn was a lawyer is a little like saying that the pope is a Catholic.
00:09:19.620It's like, well, yes. However, it goes well beyond that. Yeah. Roy Cohn began his career as a very young prosecutor. I think he was like 25, like a baby, gunning to kill Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple who are convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.
00:09:38.640And, you know, we look at Lindsey Graham, who is famous for being a war hawk who really came into his own as a neoconservative, like military interventionist during the war on terror era.
00:09:51.840Roy Cohn was an anti-communist agitator and persecutor of people on the political left from the Cold War era.
00:10:00.940Right. So after he made his name, securing the electric chair for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, including some really egregious misconduct and, you know, subsequent revelations have suggested that he actually knew that Ethel was innocent of everything he was accusing her of or much of what he was accusing her of and made sure that she got the death penalty anyway.
00:10:22.120nasty guy he goes on to work for joseph mccarthy a senator on an anti-communist
00:10:30.640mission also by the way a widely alleged closeted homosexual so he becomes the architect of the0.98
00:10:39.760mccarthy hearings dragging people in front of the senate committee to interrogate them0.50
00:10:48.180about their alleged communist sympathies.
00:12:19.160And he, you know, wasn't exactly in the closet.
00:12:23.480People talk about going over to Roy Cohn's like townhouse in Manhattan in the 1970s.
00:12:30.460And it being full of very beautiful young men in various states of undress.
00:12:36.920He would have orgies on his yacht that people just like knew about. And fascinatingly, the yacht was called, because boats have names, it was called the Defiance.
00:12:47.780Which I think is so amazing because he was really defying the closet.
00:12:51.880You know, so I think what's really interesting about the closet is that we can historicize it and it functioned this way for a lot of people, still does function this way for a lot of people, as a state of like defensiveness and fear.
00:13:04.600I think for Roy Cohn, that's not really true. Eventually, he had enough money, enough power, enough ability to strike fear into people that the closet, such as it was, became just an extension of his own power. He was living, for all intents and purposes, an openly gay life. But he had this pretext of plausible deniability, which functionally amounted to, I dare you to say something.
00:13:32.620You guys on In Bed with the Right did an amazing series of episodes on Roy Cohn that I think people should go listen to if they are interested in learning more about this wicked, wicked man.
00:13:43.340But I think that is like one of the single most interesting takeaways about his life to me.0.99
00:13:48.860His philosophy was that gay men are weak and effeminate.0.99
00:18:46.960Both of Lindsey Graham's parents died within 15 months of each other while Lindsey was
00:18:53.000at college, making him the legal guardian of his little sister, who is now, by the way,
00:18:59.020assuming Lindsey's role in the Senate in the wake of his death, despite no democratic process,
00:19:04.920and also she's never held political office in her life.
00:19:07.300So I don't know how it works in this country that it's just like, well, my sister takes my like, OK, his sister has said, quote, Lindsay's kind of like a brother, a father and a mother rolled into one.
00:19:21.100Lindsay Graham got his law degree in 1981.
00:19:25.100He entered the Air Force in 1982 at age 27.
00:19:29.080He served in active duty for five years, but was never a combatant.
00:19:33.000Lindsey Graham, I think, he derives a lot of his self-mythologized masculinity and hardness
00:19:39.800to all of his time in the military. But he was never a combatant, just to be clear. He was then
00:19:45.540in the South Carolina Air National Guard for six years, then joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve in
00:19:53.4401995, which he was in for like 20 years. Interestingly, he joined the Air Force Reserve
00:19:59.840The year after Don't Ask, Don't Tell was passed. Do you want to talk a little bit about Don't Ask, Don't Tell and Lindsey Graham?
00:20:06.680Yeah. So Don't Ask, Don't Tell was, if you can believe it, supposed to be a pro-gay intervention that prohibited gay people from being out in the military, but also prohibited the military from asking troops if they were gay.
00:20:29.360So it used to be before Don't Ask, Don't Tell was passed as an initiative in the first Bill Clinton administration.
00:20:36.740It used to be that when you signed up to join the military, they asked, are you now or have you ever been homosexual?
00:20:44.020I believe was the phrasing. And you couldn't be like, oh, a little bit in college, you know, like it was supposed to be disqualifying.
00:20:50.700don't ask don't tell removed that question but did not remove the requirement that gay people
00:20:58.540in the military be discharged dishonorably and excluded from veterans benefits so when he
00:21:06.000actually originally enlisted in the air force in 1982 he would have been asked they would have
00:21:13.420said are you a homosexual and presumably he said no because he did serve for five years in the air
00:21:20.360force proper and i think it's interesting that you note matt that he was not like a soldier he
00:21:26.520was not a pilot he was not a marine he was what's called a jag or judge advocate general which is
00:21:33.580basically a lawyer within the military's own justice system so you know he had gone to law
00:21:39.900school by that point he enlisted at an officer level because he'd been in rotc so he was never
00:21:45.960like a grunt or a private and he you know is basically a lawyer within the military justice
00:21:52.400systems and he like writes memos for you know much of his military career about stuff that
00:21:58.560it's legal for the military to do but by the late 80s he's not really doing it anymore yeah he
00:22:06.460switches to the reserve which is a much lower commitment it's not full-time famously it's
00:22:12.240supposed to be like one weekend a month. But he is continually promoted within the U.S. Air Force
00:22:19.460Reserve because the military brass and his office first in the House and then later in the Senate
00:22:28.040really like having him do photo ops. So for years and years, they'll fly him to military bases in
00:22:36.200Afghanistan, in Iraq, in wherever, and they'll put him in a uniform and they'll have him pose
00:22:42.080with the people there who are actually doing the work and he just accumulates promotions and when
00:22:47.020he formally retired he was in fact entitled to a military pension even though he had not done
00:22:52.340significant military work in like literal decades it's so bizarre like how much of the u.s military
00:22:58.920industrial complex is held up by like theater oh yeah it's a total it was a total graft for him it
00:23:04.340was nuts in the mid-90s lindsey graham served one two-year term in the south carolina state0.59
00:23:11.160House of Representatives. This was his first job in office. And the first bill he ever tried to
00:23:17.080pass in his political career, in his life, was a ban on gays and lesbians from the South Carolina
00:23:23.600Army National Guard. Fascinatingly, not from the South Carolina Air Force National Guard,
00:23:31.600which was what he was in. So I don't know. A part of me wonders if he was like,
00:23:36.620I need to get the stink off me, but like over there, you know.
00:23:39.340Don't look over there. Don't pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Yeah.
00:23:44.060What a strange way to walk into a political career just to be like,0.85
00:23:48.820ban gays and lesbians in this like specific area of the state military.0.61
00:23:53.280It's like specifically his life too, right? Like I think we're taking the liberty of assuming with,
00:23:59.540I would say pretty ample evidence that this is a gay man. It's also a man who's spending a lot0.86
00:24:05.340of time in South Carolina in the military right it's the two parts of his life and he is like oh
00:24:11.820they will never meet thank you very much yeah in 1994 Lindsay sets his sights on higher power
00:24:19.940looking to fill the U.S. House seat for South Carolina's third congressional district he won
00:24:25.960that election and went on to serve four consecutive two-year terms in the seat until 2002 at which
00:24:34.060point he eyed the senate by the way when he first joined the senate he made a promise that he would
00:24:40.900only serve two of those six-year senate terms at the time of his death he had just won the
00:24:48.460primary election for his fifth term yeah which i wish i could say that was a problem unique to0.97
00:24:54.620lindsey graham but all of them are like i'm not gonna hold on to power for 45 000 fucking years0.95
00:25:01.160and then guess what? They do. We need term limits yesterday. But I want to touch briefly on0.99
00:25:08.420Lindsey Graham's record on LGBTQ issues while in office, because this is obviously the theme of
00:25:15.720today's episode. While he was in the House of Representatives, one of his early fights in US
00:25:22.420Congress, also anti-gay, was against the legalization of gay marriage. In 1996, he supported
00:25:29.260DOMA or the Defense of Marriage Act, which federally defined marriage exclusively as a union
00:25:35.020between one man and one woman. As a senator, Lindsay fought for a constitutional amendment
00:25:43.080that would ban gay marriage. He was very desperate to get ahead of the idea that gay marriage would0.99
00:25:50.000one day become legalized, which it did for now. And he was really gunning for a literal0.93
00:25:57.340constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. He
00:26:02.460co-sponsored such an amendment. He voted to ban gay parents from adopting children. He opposed1.00
00:26:08.600repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 2010. He was still technically in the reserves at that point.
00:26:13.980You know, he loves his closet. He voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in 2013,
00:26:21.260which would have protected LGBTQ people from employment discrimination based on sexual
00:26:29.020orientation and gender. He defended state level bans on gender affirming medical care for trans
00:26:34.500people and more recently co-sponsored a bill that aimed to strip grade schools and colleges
00:26:40.460of public funding if they allowed trans athletes to compete with their peers. And I don't mean to
00:26:49.080be tedious by outlining all of these points of someone's political career, but Lindsey Graham
00:26:56.440caused so much pain to so many people, like a really, really great amount of pain to more people
00:27:04.140than I think the brain can fathom, like such a great amount of suffering. And that's just in the
00:27:13.180realm of lgbtq people lindsey graham is of course best known for being a war hawk and for as i said1.00
00:27:19.780at the beginning being in favor of all of these various military invasions all of which have
00:27:24.580failed spectacularly by the way we'll get into this more later but i don't know i find him to
00:27:30.460be like just like such a waste of life because all he did was suffer privately and make other
00:27:36.940people suffer sorry i'm gonna cut this i'm gonna we'll get we'll get back to it at the end yeah
00:27:41.920you're onto something here. I think there's something about the closet and like dying in
00:27:46.680the closet that can feel very sad, right? Yeah. It can be like, oh, he never, he never accepted
00:27:52.360himself. He never came to terms with this truth about himself. Right. And for me, that's really
00:27:57.860complicated by how much dignity harm and exclusion and really material harm, like money and violence
00:28:06.040that he inflicted on other people who were struggling with the same problem.
00:28:12.120It would be one thing if he was only cruel to himself, but he really wasn't.
00:28:19.160I would like to give a shout out to the sponsor of today's episode, Incogni.
00:28:24.860I admittedly used to kind of roll my eyes at people who were overly serious
00:28:31.800or what I perceived as overly serious about online privacy and this is just one of those things that
00:28:39.180I have changed my views on as time has gone on and I've learned more about how the internet
00:28:45.720functions and how surveillance functions how a lot of things function. Now much more so than I used
00:28:51.220to I try to do things that keep my data a little bit more protected as someone who is online all
00:28:58.960the time. And Incogni is one great way to do just that. If you don't know, there are thousands of
00:29:05.600companies online that are buying, trading, selling, aggregating your personal data. And these are
00:29:12.000called data brokers. This is information you've entered online at some point or another. Things
00:29:17.660like your name, your address, your date of birth, your education, your shopping habits, your
00:29:22.720employment now the thing is you have the legal right to request that data brokers get rid of
00:29:29.780your information that they delete it from their systems but the problem is it would take a really
00:29:34.880really really long time for you to personally track all of these companies down and do it yourself
00:29:40.400luckily there's incogni incogni takes care of the messy work for you automatically by reaching out
00:29:48.040to all of these different data brokers on your behalf making sure they get rid of your information
00:29:53.840and dealing with their pesky objections. And with Incogni's custom removal feature which is on the
00:30:00.620unlimited plan and the family unlimited plan you can point to any like people search website where
00:30:07.320your private information is publicly visible and one of Incogni's privacy care agents will take
00:30:13.620care of it for you. If getting your information out of the hands of data brokers is something
00:30:18.040that sounds nice to you, then maybe try out Incogni. You can get 60% off a new plan right
00:30:25.180now at incogni.com slash fruity. That is 60% off at incogni.com slash fruity. And now let's get
00:30:34.480back to it. You have devoted a lot of your work to abortion rights, and I know he has a wild0.96
00:30:45.040record on abortion that I would be remiss to not let you expand on before we continue.
00:30:51.120In the grand tradition of gender conservatives, Lindsey Graham's hostility towards queer and
00:30:59.900trans people has been paired with a hostility for the rights of like cis women in the case of
00:31:07.440abortion he has been at the forefront of pushing bills that would create and have created federal
00:31:16.100precedent for the concept of fetal personhood which would if recognized by the court ban abortion
00:31:23.480nationwide and really restrict the freedom of cis women and anybody assigned female at birth
00:31:29.420with the capacity to give birth, right, even those who are not pregnant. So he was at the
00:31:34.800forefront of a bill that made it a federal crime to injure a fetus that sort of doubles the crime
00:31:45.560of violence or injury committed against a pregnant person. If you are convicted under this law of
00:31:53.660violence against a pregnant person that injures their fetus, the law does not construe that
00:31:59.260as a violation of the pregnant person, right?
00:32:28.220Lindsey Graham also did this like really slimy shit in the wake of the Dobbs versus Jackson women's health decision in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade.0.98
00:32:39.260So the Dobbs decision overturned Roe, saying there is no federal constitutional right to an abortion and states can ban abortion at will.0.99
00:32:49.680It continues to create public health and women's rights and civil rights crises across the country.0.90
00:32:56.220It has caused people to die. It has caused people to lose their grip on their dreams and lose control over their bodies. Lindsey Graham came in and he says, I have a solution that's going to bring the whole country into accord.
00:33:10.580and his solution which he described as a national standard was in fact a national abortion ban
00:33:17.920he said i want to make it so that no abortions can be performed in the united states after 15
00:33:26.440weeks of gestation and he pitched this as this is something that everybody across the aisle
00:33:31.620can get behind because it creates a national standard implying falsely that the bill he was
00:33:38.180proposing would prohibit states from banning abortion before 15 weeks. In fact, it would not.
00:33:44.600It would prohibit states from allowing abortion after 15 weeks. So he not only proposed limiting
00:33:51.180the rights of women and assigned female people across the country in ways that would harm their
00:33:57.280dignity and their health and create some particularly tragic circumstances for people
00:34:29.020Should we have a little good old tabloid fun?
00:34:31.860Uh, Lindsay's entire career as a senator has been peppered with rumors about his sexuality
00:34:38.520and bachelor status. What we know about his relationships is limited. From his 2015 memoir,
00:34:46.540aptly titled My Story, he wrote, I've never been married. Sorry. I've never been married.
00:34:53.520I guess I attribute that to timing, too. The opportunity never presented itself
00:35:01.040at the right time, or I never found time to meet the right girl, or the right girl was smart enough
00:35:07.260not to have time for me. Every single time that Lindsey Graham sort of waves away these rumors,
00:35:14.860I feel myself right back in the backseat of my mom's car when she's like picking me up from school0.93
00:35:24.600and asking me if there's any girls at school that I'm interested in. And I have to find some way
00:35:30.080to be like you know the classic was like i'm just focusing on school i don't know if you ever pulled
00:35:34.680that one but i would always be like i'm focusing on school or i'm just too busy or i'm gonna and
00:35:40.340it's like i'm 11 what am i too busy doing but i was too busy for girls it's very familiar to me
00:35:46.240it's actually perhaps the most i can relate to lindsey graham on yeah he's so uncomfortable
00:35:50.420right yeah like you can imagine a different politician a roy cone writing that sentence
00:35:57.180and having fun with it you know he's not having fun he's not playing he's not winking he's not
00:36:05.100breaking the fourth wall but he's also not doing anything that indicates to me a sense of comfort
00:36:11.380which you can you could be in the closet and not hate the fact that you're gay and i i'm reading
00:36:18.840that and i'm like oh he really hates this about himself he has a few stories that he tells about
00:36:24.260women that he has allegedly dated did they live in canada or go to another school they go to another
00:36:30.760school george glass he says that he had a girlfriend in law school named debbie
00:36:41.380that he dated a military officer named carol and that he dated a flight attendant named sylvia
00:36:49.220i love this none of these women have ever gotten last names sylvia she's a flight attendant she's
00:36:56.620at a different airline it's almost like a mad libs it's like boomer woman name0.99
00:37:01.540exactly yeah exactly but you know there have been many memorable confrontations between lindsey and0.92
00:37:12.860the public on this issue coming from both sides of the political aisle notably from the left0.98
00:37:18.400people have long sought to highlight his hypocrisy in being a gay, anti-gay activist.0.98
00:37:25.360And from the right, well, people want to know if he's gay because they don't like it.0.93
00:37:30.680There's also been a long sort of conspiratorial, like national security accusation that you might
00:37:38.620be familiar with made that like Lindsey Graham's allegiance to Israel or like any other foreign
00:37:44.300nation, or sometimes from the right, they'll say like, you're willing to compromise with Democrats0.95
00:37:48.520is because these different people and entities could have like gay sexual blackmail on him,0.99
00:37:55.580which like, I don't know. To me, it's a little far fetched. Like a lot of people, especially0.99
00:38:01.920in the new like Groyper adjacent right are like Lindsey Graham is devoted to Israel because0.88
00:38:10.220Massad has has sexual blackmail on him and they know that he's gay and I'm kind of just like guys
00:38:15.180I think he's a Christian Zionist there's a lot of them yeah and also this is like this gets into0.89
00:38:20.680something that we'll talk more about but it's like this conspiracy that like we are weakened0.99
00:38:27.100in national security by like a cabal of closeted gay men is such a convenient way to avoid real
00:38:36.100topics like oligarchy and capitalism and these like actual allegiances that people have to power0.97
00:38:42.040yeah i mean if massad is like blackmailing lindsey graham for being gay then like how
00:38:47.420are they what are they blackmailing all the other republican senators with you know what i mean yeah
00:38:51.160right there's so many people doing this same thing that the particularities of this guy is
00:38:58.520like personal life being uh at the core of the explanation for it just seems like a bit of a
00:39:03.800stretch i will say i think like the closet makes straight people nervous because it it reads as
00:39:12.420dishonesty it doesn't read as like this person is ashamed this person is suffering this person
00:39:18.020is protecting themselves it reads as this person's lying to you and what else might they be lying
00:39:24.280about uh and that is also i think a moral pretext for homophobia and just like the visceral
00:39:33.500disgust that sometimes people feel at like gay sex and gay sexuality right yeah they're like oh0.71
00:39:38.400it's not that i'm like imagining lindsey graham doing butt stuff or whatever that like really0.97
00:39:44.000creeps me out it's that he's lying right it also becomes a way like i'm not i'm not mad that you
00:39:48.480cheated i'm mad that you lied about it's like girl you're kind of mad that he cheated you know
00:39:51.260what i mean it's like this pretext where people who don't want to just cop to being grossed out0.69
00:39:56.820by gay people can also be like well it's that he's covering it up it's that he's living a double life
00:40:01.180this was like core to the pretext in the lavender scare as advanced by people like roy cone and
00:40:08.660other one of lindsey graham's like you know members of his lineage right this notion that0.76
00:40:12.640you can't have gay people in the state department or in the civil service because they're liable to0.71
00:40:19.060blackmail and it's like well if you guys were a little nicer to gay people the blackmail wouldn't0.95
00:40:23.760have any effect right because everybody would be out of the closet 100 really well said i want to
00:40:29.160walk through a timeline of some of these Lindsey Graham rumors and confrontations and glean from
00:40:36.480them what we may. So in 2009, amidst confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor,
00:40:44.400Lindsey Graham probed her on anonymous rumors that she had poor temperament. And as he left
00:40:52.200the hearings, there was a blogger named Mike Stark who walked up to Lindsey Graham and said,
00:40:58.160My name's Mike Stark. I'm with the Cook It Dope. Okay. So I do this video blog thing. Okay. Remember on the hearings with Justice Sotomayor, you had asked about a lot of the rumors you had heard about her temperament. And you said you had read, you know, these things were rumored on the internet all over the place. You're aware of a lot of anonymous comments made by people that may be afraid of a powerful senator from South Carolina regarding your sexuality.
00:41:24.160so do you have to answer questions about that i mean i know a lot of people from the christian
00:41:29.120right yeah elect senators from south carolina this is different to me again he's squirming
00:41:34.900yeah it doesn't seem to be something he ever found a line on yeah even though it was a part
00:41:41.640of his career for like decades what's funny to me about this is it's that video is from 2009 and
00:41:48.220it's like filmed on a calculator this exact thing happened as he was leaving a recent congressional
00:41:55.520meeting like a couple months if that before he died where someone went up to him and was just
00:42:01.060like like why don't you just come out of the closet already like something like that and he0.76
00:42:04.840to your point he never found a line on it hey lindsey why don't you just admit that you're gay0.98
00:42:08.800and then people won't blackmail you anymore but lindsey graham was seen by some republicans0.99
00:42:15.460during the Obama years as being too willing to work with the Democrats in power. You know,0.97
00:42:21.100like I said, a lot of the further right Republicans attributed that to Democrats having like gay0.97
00:42:26.360blackmail on him. And in 2010, Lindsey Graham gave an interview to The New York Times where0.69
00:42:32.060they asked him about this. During a South Carolina Tea Party rally this spring, one speaker created
00:42:37.100an uproar by postulating that Graham supported a guest worker program out of fear that the
00:42:41.880Democrats might otherwise expose his homosexuality. Graham smirked when I brought this up.
00:42:47.580Like, maybe I'm having a clandestine affair with Ricky Martin. He said, I know it's really going
00:42:53.060to upset a lot of gay men. I'm sure hundreds of them are going to be jumping off the Golden Gate0.96
00:42:58.160Bridge, but I ain't available. I ain't gay. Sorry. I don't want to be petty, but the idea that hundreds0.96
00:43:04.880of gay men are jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge because they can't be with Lindsey Graham. First
00:43:09.520of all i think they can whatever this is the closest that he's having fun he's like obviously
00:43:17.060they're all lining up for me yeah you know it's a little self-deprecating i'll give him credit
00:43:21.840for that like side of the joke he's like oh as if they're all in love with me you know yeah but
00:43:28.160also it reveals that he's thought about this a little much i'm like okay so he's got ricky
00:43:33.720martin specifically yes he's also got the golden gate bridge so he's thinking about the dense
00:43:38.100concentration of gay men in beautiful san francisco i'm like okay all right you've uh you've turned
00:43:45.300some of this over he's getting a little like he's a little more successful i would say yeah in that
00:43:50.720one than when he's just like no no this is different totally totally in 2014 lindsey graham
00:43:58.820who had at that point uh been serving as a senator from south carolina for 12 years two terms
00:44:28.160We're ready for a new leader to merge the Republican Party.
00:44:32.060And I just found this one funny because I'm like,
00:44:33.700what does it mean to be ambiguously gay it's not that ambiguous i mean i've never heard this term
00:44:38.420used in my life oh actually no it's from i'm dating myself i'm a little older than you matt
00:44:44.660there was a south not south park a saturday night live animated skit that was very much the product
00:44:51.880of like an aughts era homophobia it was a pair of superheroes who were called the ambiguously gay
00:44:58.720duo oh and the joke is that they fight crime but then there's also a lot of like innuendo
00:45:05.120in their dialogue they've got a really catchy theme song it's like the ambiguously gay duo
00:45:10.400it's actually kind of cute i didn't know about this yeah you should check out the ambiguously
00:45:16.080gay duo but that's definitely what he's referencing that same year bill maher jokes about lindsey
00:45:23.500Graham's sexuality on national TV. New rule, Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock has to either
00:45:31.660ugly it up a little or, yes, that's a congressman. Either ugly it up a little or explain how Lindsey
00:45:39.280Graham is supposed to get any work done around here. Not a bad joke, Bill Maher, not a bad joke.1.00
00:45:48.680And if you're listening to the to the audio only version of this podcast, Aaron Shock, who at that time was a Republican congressman representing Illinois' 18th congressional district, was on the cover of Men's Health, abs glistening in perfect lighting.
00:49:28.420But, you know, in my mind, and I'm all about forgiveness, like I really am, you know, restorative
00:49:34.960justice and all that and aaron shock you know despite being out of office he's still an extremely0.75
00:49:41.940well-connected wealthy guy especially relative to like almost any other lgbtq person in the country
00:49:48.060no he can't vote on things in congress anymore but he's connected you know he can get involved
00:49:54.060with charities he can hook people up to you know all sorts of political projects i mean there's
00:49:58.780like there's so much that erin shock can do and i was very pissed off by this uh coming out slideshow
00:50:06.240which was mostly self-pitying about how hard it was to be in the closet and i'm like yeah girl me
00:50:10.720too but i wasn't in office i with a much smaller following back then posted something pissy on my
00:50:18.260instagram story because i i used to i used to vet myself a little less before i posted things that
00:50:24.000said I would do this again now I remember I remember I didn't even tag him you know I was
00:50:29.440just like how convenient you know that you get to gallivant in the in the into the sun with your0.99
00:50:33.980muscle gay friends in West Hollywood or wherever the fuck and live a life that you at one of the0.99
00:50:40.260highest possible offices in the United States used to deny other people right Aaron Shock0.99
00:50:46.760direct messaged me and he said something to the effect of i would love i'm gonna put the dms on
00:50:54.280the screen something to the effect of i'd love to to use my privilege to help the community
00:51:00.120now that i'm out you know tell me how i can and i was 21 and he was like in his 40s when this
00:51:09.160happened and i was like dude really you can't figure out like what i don't know the human
00:51:15.080rights campaign is like do something. Google still worked back then. He could have used Google.
00:51:21.160You know, nonetheless, I had a very long conversation with him for I remember the
00:51:26.300whole afternoon we DM for hours. I was so patient. I thought, you know, here's this X, Y and Z
00:51:32.320thing you can do. I worked with a group at the time called Encircle, which helped the LGBTQ
00:51:37.840community in Utah, which struggles a lot, obviously, under the thumb of the Mormon church.
00:51:42.600And I was like, you could do this. I sent him all the names, everything. Do you know what he did?0.58
00:51:48.700Guessing a whole lot of nothing at best.
00:51:51.440Absolutely nothing. And in fact, during Trump's 2024 campaign, he hosted alongside Rick Grinnell and Matt Gaetz, among others, a Trump unity Gays for Trump fundraiser in Wisconsin, where Aaron Schock was a headlining speaker.
00:52:14.820anyway that's my Aaron Shock rant I guess we're just getting a lot of different flavors0.88
00:52:20.060of a shameless gay republican I think Lindsey Graham had shame Aaron Shock has no shame0.99
00:52:25.080and Aaron Shock is still alive I mean it's just this genre of person they're always carving out0.97
00:52:32.060an exception for them I'm thinking of like the way I see women on the right they're often people
00:52:38.380who have managed to arrange their lives in such a way0.87
01:01:29.840you know this does if anything make me uh sympathetic to the idea that dana bash at
01:01:36.660one point did do journalism like i said it just it just transports me back to the worst moments
01:01:44.660in the closet where i'm like get me out of here you know what i mean yeah but this is like seventh
01:01:50.760grade level of like closeted kid absence of self-confidence like the degree to which he's
01:01:56.600squirming at even this like playful joking like quite like attenuated and abstract
01:02:04.960allusion to personal life isn't like i don't know maybe this is just like because i i don't hang out
01:02:11.980with people who are in the closet but like i don't know any gay men who couldn't play this game
01:02:16.620yeah right like because it's fun because it doesn't matter uh and he's just like so visibly0.70
01:02:23.020uncomfortable he never even learned again he like doesn't he has not seemingly learned to play this
01:02:28.120for laughs he has no no indication that he's in on the joke at all in 2018 on national coming out
01:02:33.440day chelsea handler tweets if you're wondering why republicans took a sick day today it's probably
01:02:39.200because it's hashtag national coming out day looking at you at lindsey graham south carolina
01:02:44.380to which lindsey graham responded publicly quote to the extent that it matters i'm not gay to the
01:02:50.820extent that it matters i like that i like that syntax what about the extent to which it doesn't
01:02:59.500matter as far as yours concerned i'm not gay for your purposes sweetheart i'm not gay i want to
01:03:08.640inject a drop of nuance here to say that uh with some respect to what chelsea handler is trying to0.92
01:03:16.400do here. I don't really like when straight people do this. Yeah. There's a section of my listenership
01:03:22.320that is probably going to think I'm like too woke about it. I don't care. That's fine. But it is one
01:03:26.740thing when Moira and I, when we gays sit here and have a thoughtful and yes, admittedly sometimes0.68
01:03:33.780fun conversation about a homophobic closeted politician sexuality. But when it becomes fodder
01:03:40.560for straight people to say things that if you strip back the politics of it are to me straight
01:03:46.340forwardly homophobic I get a little bit uncomfortable is that fair in your eyes I think
01:03:53.160Chelsea Handler thinks that she's making fun of homophobia here yeah and I think what she's
01:03:57.820actually doing unintentionally I'm gonna credit her here I can't read her mind but I'm pretty sure
01:04:03.180that she's not intentionally doing this but I think she's actually sort of relying on being
01:04:09.580gay as something shameful a little bit for the underlying humor there's another Chelsea Handler
01:04:14.720tweet that I need to find right now. I wasn't going to read this one, but now it's like relevant0.93
01:04:19.180because I thought it was, I was like, I was like uncomfortable even reading it. From Chelsea
01:04:22.700Handler. Hey, Lindsey Graham, what kind of dick sucking video do they have on you for you to be1.00
01:04:28.440acting like this? Wouldn't coming out be more honorable? I want to contrast this with a tweet1.00
01:04:34.840from a one Katya Zamalachikova, who when recently before Lindsey Graham died, Lindsey Graham tweeted
01:04:42.040game on pray for Israel Katya replied life is not a joke and war is not a game but you clearly0.99
01:04:49.800don't give a shit about public service or human life you're nothing but an abhorrent Zionist0.99
01:04:54.340death cult cheering soulless ghoul just quit politics and focus on something you really love1.00
01:04:59.220like I don't know maybe sucking dick after dick in a public bathroom you despicable closeted1.00
01:05:04.500faggoty piece of shit. Now, we're not mincing words anymore. And I will say that such a tweet1.00
01:05:12.620comes off very differently from a celebrated and beloved drag queen than it does from Chelsea
01:05:18.680Handler. Yeah, I think like, it is always most advisable to avoid trying to reappropriate0.92
01:05:30.440bigotries that have like not been wielded at you i believe that like if you really sat down and had0.99
01:05:37.920heart to heart with chelsea handler she doesn't think that anything is wrong with sucking dick0.98
01:05:43.280right um right but like this kind of attempt at a gotcha does sound really different from a straight0.99
01:05:52.300person than from somebody who i'm pretty sure has experienced homophobia maybe a smidge you0.99
01:05:57.480know what i mean right right moving on with our timeline in 2020 we get the big one gay porn actor0.73
01:06:07.540sean harding tweets on june 4th 2020 when we are all sitting at our homes during lockdown not much0.96
01:06:14.640going on this was destined to be a hit on twitter quote there is a homophobic republican senator who
01:06:21.980is no better than trump who keeps passing legislation that is damaging to the lgbt and
01:06:26.760minority communities. Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man, wondering if enough of us
01:06:32.600spoke out, if that could get him out of office. I cannot do this alone. If you'd be willing to
01:06:38.280stand with me against LG, please let me know. So far, I have two individuals who would be willing
01:06:45.180to go public and support my claims. Anyone else? Now, not much came of this. Not immediately,
01:06:51.860anyway. Not many people came forward, if anyone at all. And I think that confused people. And
01:06:59.240I think that's because people often misunderstand how power works, even during the height of
01:07:05.360scandal. To illustrate what I mean by that, I want to do yet another gay politician interlude0.90
01:07:11.060and tell you about a man named Barney Frank. In 1985, Barney Frank was a 45-year-old closeted0.50
01:07:19.700Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing Massachusetts.
01:07:25.060That year, he found a classified advertisement in a local newspaper for Steve Gobi, a sex worker
01:07:32.220in his mid-20s. Barney Frank paid Steve $80 for sex. They became friends afterwards, and Barney
01:07:40.980hired Steve to become his personal aide, his housekeeper, his driver, all the things. Steve
01:07:47.920Steve said that Barney Frank, quote, hoped to reform him out of sex work, which, by the way,
01:07:54.320I find to be, you know, just a pretty grotesque attitude to have towards someone who you did0.87
01:07:59.120hire to have sex with you. Nonetheless, Steve continued doing sex work, sometimes using Barney0.96
01:08:05.480Frank's D.C. home to host clients. And in 1987, they parted ways after two years. Barney says
01:08:12.820that he fired Steve after finding out that Steve was using his home to host clients, though Steve
01:08:19.360would later say that Barney always knew that he was doing this. And Steve says he broke it off
01:08:24.240with Barney when Barney's sexual and emotional demands became too much. Afterwards, Steve floated
01:08:31.420from apartment to apartment in Washington, D.C., struggling to pay rent and facing various evictions.
01:08:37.160And after two years, in August of 1989, Steve Gobi came forward with his story about Barney Frank.
01:08:46.340He says that he had been tipped off that the Washington Times was investigating a story about an alleged cowboy ring run out of a house in D.C. and figured that he'd be caught sooner or later.
01:08:58.060Steve, for his part, tried to start a bidding war for the story between various newspapers.
01:09:03.760Ultimately, he gave it to the Washington Times for free in hopes that it would land him a book deal.
01:11:46.180And I think in the interest of the transgender community, as well as others, it's going to be better to go at that in a more granular way and not simply announce that if you don't support it, you're a homophobe.0.92
01:12:02.100And died 17 days later. He literally died complaining about how trans people took the gay rights movement too far. Goodbye, Barney Frank.
01:12:12.180And where is Steve Gobi? Well, one year after the story broke and interest in it had waned, Steve was arrested for possession of marijuana after getting into a fight with an off-duty cop. And that's pretty much the last information I can find about him before his obituary from 2020 when he died in his late 50s.
01:12:32.560You know, I think when people hear this kind of sex scandal, be it somebody who's in the closet, somebody who's cheating on their spouse, somebody who's hiring sex workers, or even somebody who's committing sexual violence, they assume that the person who has this story about a prominent man can make a quick buck.
01:13:00.620They assume that media attention equals money and opportunity.
01:13:05.820They assume that people will pay for this.
01:13:11.360They assume that it will be something that redounds to the benefit of the storyteller or the accuser, right?
01:13:19.940I think if you actually look at the people who come forward with these stories, even if it's not something like assault, even if it's just some sort of story of male sexual entitlement or sexual hypocrisy, the people who challenge that in public do not do well.
01:13:39.380You can't tell a story of a powerful man behaving in a sexually illicit or abusive or just gross way and come out with your own life intact.
01:13:54.540It really puts you through the ringer in terms of what it costs in time and humiliation and dignity and money.
01:14:03.280You have to pay a lot to do that in all those different cases.
01:14:07.420and you often don't get very much out.
01:18:51.900These are people who are making like low margin business transactions here.
01:18:57.920And I think that is another thing that we should keep in mind when we're like making these kinds of assessments of like, OK, what do these people owe the public about their stories?
01:19:10.820It's like these are often not people who are rolling in it.
01:19:14.600Yeah. I want to talk about Hunter Biden for a second.
01:19:19.440Hunter Biden, also of hiring sex worker fame and also of crack fame.
01:19:25.420uh hunter biden is making a media resurgence uh for some sort of unclear reason he's going on all
01:19:33.580the podcasts he's like hitting it big on twitter he's highlighting the positive aspects as he
01:19:39.820claims of his father's legacy and he recently went on a one jen welch's podcast jen welch who i love
01:19:47.220so much but he said something that uh i found to be really quite odd about what he calls
01:19:54.860the closetocracy i believe that the biggest problem in america is as in in washington dc
01:20:00.920with the federal government is a is it not the oligarchy um closet cases it's the closetocracy
01:20:07.120as i call it it is and i'm and i'm being totally serious everybody knows there is like this0.84
01:20:14.000closeted gay mafia largely republican that exists in washington dc and everybody knows0.67
01:20:24.360every single one of them who who's gay and so it's in and what i believe the the only reason0.65
01:20:33.000that that is relevant is because i believe that internal conflict creates so much vitriol inside0.81
01:20:42.920a person that they take it out on the rest of the world and they do and so what they do is their
01:20:48.520whole lives they've been closeted and so you have this like black ball inside your yourself this
01:20:55.160like black blackened heart by the fact that you can't be who you want to be and so you take it
01:21:01.560out on everybody else and these men largely men have done exactly that and they're everybody knows0.99
01:21:10.600who they are everybody i'm sorry that shit's just woke homophobia0.97
01:21:15.560that stuff pisses me off so much love jen welch i have to say i love jen welch so much no nothing0.91
01:21:22.640but love to her i think she's like maybe you're gonna save democracy but like yeah if anybody
01:21:27.100does it it'll be her right but this is two straight people talking to microphones about0.77
01:21:31.520how gay people have a moral rot that they are not capable of having it's like positing itself
01:21:38.400as concern about the deleterious effects of homophobia, but it also takes this moral failure,0.98
01:21:45.420this capacity for contempt, this sadism, and ascribes that as being a gay trait. And I'm
01:21:55.180sorry, I don't think Lindsey Graham is a bad person because he was in the closet. I think
01:22:00.860he's a bad person because he has bad values, because he made bad decisions. He is not a bad
01:22:07.260person because he's a gay man because if that was the determining factor what about all the1.00
01:22:12.680fucking straight people doing that shit it's a long route back to saying gay people are morally1.00
01:22:17.940different from us and they are morally lesser than us and i just don't think it's compatible1.00
01:22:23.080with a commitment to gay rights and dignity yeah i i agree i mean i i struggle with this a lot0.81
01:22:30.240because i think that there is like a kernel of something interesting in what he's saying here
01:22:36.940Like, I do think on like a on like a limited psychoanalysis of this one person that we're talking about today. I do wonder if his own personal struggles as it relates to his identity caused him to unleash more violence on other people. That's the fault of homophobia.
01:22:56.280If you take that moral logic as correct, if you take Hunter Biden's psychological logic or psychoanalysis of Lindsey Graham and others, supposedly, and let's bracket it and say for the sake of argument it's true.
01:23:12.140Say that somebody like Lindsey Graham really was driven by his gay shame to be a warmonger in Iran or to cheerlead for Donald Trump at home.0.74
01:23:28.380then you would have to first of all there'd be a lot more gay men in washington than i think0.95
01:23:33.400there are but then you would also have to blame that function not on lindsey graham being a gay0.65
01:23:40.300man but on the social structure of homophobia that makes being a gay man so shameful right uh
01:23:46.340and so like self-hating right it's still like i think what's off to me is like even if you posit
01:23:51.880it as correct even if you sort of like accept that there there's a little bit of truth there
01:23:57.700it's still putting the blame on the gay individual rather than on the homophobic society yeah i mean
01:24:06.380my biggest problem with this which i am seeing more and more and more of on the right specifically
01:24:14.060is not that there is not interesting psychoanalysis to be done of someone like lindsey
01:24:21.000graham and where the blame should ultimately of course be put on homophobia and inspire us to
01:24:27.020create a society that's less homophobic and therefore we have less violence out of closeted0.97
01:24:33.300angry gay men, right? It's not that. To me, the problem is that this obscures a much larger0.97
01:24:40.080problem, which is that, no, the biggest problem in this country is oligarchy. It is unregulated
01:24:45.720capitalism. It is all of these things that, by the way, Joe Biden, his father, championed.
01:24:53.220Joe Biden didn't help manufacture a genocide on Gaza because he was a closeted homosexual.0.93
01:25:03.820And to me, this is just such a convenient way to let off the hook all of the people and power structures that actually are responsible for the greatest amount of harm being exerted on the world from members of the United States government.0.96
01:25:19.500not because they're closeted, angry gay homophobes, but because they are allegiant to violence and0.97
01:25:27.020power and capital. Yeah. Like that's what it is to me. And my problem with this line of thinking1.00
01:25:33.220is that I was looking at the replies and quote tweets of this video, and there were a lot from0.96
01:25:39.200avowed Twitter anti-Semites saying, finally, we can talk about how it's the gay Jews controlling0.97
01:25:46.200the world. Because if you listen to what Hunter Biden is saying here, it sounds a lot like0.98
01:25:50.020anti-Semitism in its structure, in its way of they're all secretly controlling the world.
01:25:57.040And it's just it's it's not reality. It's not reality. I know it's fun to be like, look,
01:26:03.300all these closet cases. Oh, the grinder outage at the Republican National Convention, whatever.
01:26:08.680But this like homosexual, this isn't actually what's controlling the world, you guys.0.96
01:26:13.340like it's it's just not if gay men were secretly controlling the world don't you think some things0.77
01:26:17.780would be different first of all it would not be a secret for very long because they would they0.81
01:26:22.740would gossip they would tell us they'd be doing their downtown abbey offices and it'll just come
01:26:27.340out sooner or later but i just you know i think it's like a an effort to like push this away from
01:26:35.220the speaker yeah there's just like nefarious other right and like also something really kind of i
01:26:40.540think a little degrading about our current dystopia is that it's not being done in secret
01:26:45.760by a shadowy cabal. It's all being done out in the open, right in front of us. And that's,
01:26:52.260I think, you know, an insult. It would at least be, it would be a little more optimistic. I think
01:26:56.920if the people who were ruining this country and this world for the sake of their own greed
01:27:02.680were ashamed enough of themselves or scared enough of consequences that they thought they
01:27:07.900had to hide but they don't have to hide I want to talk about the mechanics of how he died because
01:27:14.220I think it's such a good metaphor do you know like the mechanics of how Lindsey Graham died
01:27:18.680not really I was trying to read it about it this morning it was like an aortic tear yeah I but I
01:27:25.100don't know what that is what happened you know you can shorthand it as like a heart attack but
01:27:29.860that's not quite what it is it wasn't like a blockage what happened that is he had a long-term
01:27:34.760disease of the heart and this is i'm sorry matt this is like such a metaphor but over time over
01:27:40.980the course of years and years his heart became weak and it became hard like brittle and eventually
01:27:50.520it just tore apart and i think that's what being a republican will do to you
01:27:57.300if not in like literal physical terms but i think living the kind of life that lindsey graham lived
01:28:06.040required him to put convenience over principle it required him to hurt people a lot it required him
01:28:14.520to look away from other people's suffering and it required him to betray things about himself
01:28:23.760and about his friends that he could have lived
01:28:28.060a much more expansive life if he had embraced instead.
01:28:32.640And I just like, I hate the heavy-handedness of this.
01:28:35.980I don't think you have to be a bad person
01:28:53.520this is a humble reminder, Lindsey Graham, this could have turned out different. You could have
01:28:58.260been a Southern Harvey Milk. He could have done so many amazing things, but he didn't.
01:29:05.200And I don't know, I was trying to think yesterday when I was taking my notes of what my thesis is
01:29:10.940on the life of Lindsey Graham, besides all of the obvious ways that he was horrible and responsible
01:29:16.960for mass death and responsible for mass suffering across the globe. But like, Lindsey Graham
01:29:24.460mongered his entire life for war with Iran, which we are now in and losing. And, you know,
01:29:34.400he finally got what he wanted, which was this war, yet another war. And then while we're in it,
01:29:43.280As, you know, U.S. service people are dying, as people in Iran are dying, as this is, you know, aiding in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the ongoing occupation and brutalization of Palestine.