If you had to wash your hair Tuesday night and were therefore unable to attend the most fab party at the RNC, The Washington Post has an account.
The self-described “most fab party at the RNC” was hosted Tuesday night by LGBT supporters of Donald Trump in a dim, dingy multipurpose room in the Wolstein Center on the campus of Cleveland State University. In front of portraits of scantily clad young men — part of a “Twinks for Trump” series — Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders addressed a crowd of mostly young people who were tipsy on cheap wine and spoiling for a fight.
Europe is “a living hell of fear and violence,” said Wilders, a leader of the far right, adding that “we are at war” with Islam. Activist Pamela Geller followed; clad in a rainbow-colored blouse with “Love Will Win” scrawled across it, she compared political correctness to sharia law and said the greatest threat to the gay community is Islam.
Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, banned from Twitter on Tuesday chiefly for encouraging online abuse of “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones, called Trump the most pro-gay candidate in history and said the gay movement has fixated on transgender bathroom issues at the expense of combating an existential threat from Islam.
(I had to look up “twinks,” and it is apparently gay slang for very young-looking males with no body or facial hair. I’m no expert on such matters, but the photos on the wall behind Geert Wilders of the guy in the “Make America Great Again” caps appear to border on child pornography.)
After the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando last month by an Islamic extremist, gays in the West have every right to be alarmed. Of course gays who actually live in many Muslim-majority countries face persecution and possible harm every day.
But the pro-Trump gays seem eager to reduce the struggle for gay rights to an exercise in anti-Muslim scaremongering. Even so, they should have noticed that after the Orlando killings, their fellow Republicans went out of their way not to mention that gays were targeted.
And they seem willing to ignore their party’s anti-LGBT platform, which “calls for overturning marriage equality, banning same-sex parenting, restricting transgender people’s access to bathrooms, and ensuring parents can force harmful conversion therapy on their LGBT kids.”
Update: According to Armaros in the comments, the photos on the wall behind Wilders do not border on child pornography, but are rather Gay Art (see his comments BTL). I’ll take his word for it, and apologize if I gave the impression that I believe gays are by nature pedophiles.
Further update: Ah. The increasingly essential James Kirchick was at the party and is on the case.
Ultimately, headliners [Ann] Coulter and [Roger] Stone didn’t show. Perhaps they were busy washing their hair.
A lot of us were. Including those (like me) without much hair to wash.
Kirchick, himself gay, continues:
But racists, lunatics and other assorted idiots were out in force just blocks from Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena where several hundred people turned out to express their affinity for “LGBTrump” (a fitting appropriation of the acronym given how the Republican Party heading into November is but a rump faction of its former self). Pictures of nubile, barely legal boys sporting nothing other than “Make America Great Again” hats graced the walls, part of a Twinks4Trump photo exhibition.
Nubile, barely legal boys? Well, okay.
And lest you think Kirchick is some sort of leftwing apologist for Islam, he adds:
The complaint that many on the left—and the gay left in particular—ignore or downplay violently homophobic aspects of Muslim cultures is one with which I am very sympathetic. Indeed, … not long ago, I wrote a piece entitled “Why Are Prominent Liberals Closeting the Motivations of the Radical Islamic Murderer Who Targeted Gays?” Last year, I defended Geller when many—including, ironically, Donald Trump—accused her of “taunting” Muslims.
Read it all. It’s too good to quote selectively.
