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As we hear increasingly more conservative voices – such as former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne, Senator John McCain's wife Cindy and daughter Meghan – expressing their support for same-sex marriage, I asked Charles T. Moran, National Spokesperson for the Log Cabin Republicans, what it meant to be a gay Republican at this point in history.
MR: The LGBT rights movement seems to be very much of a twentieth-century effort, and it is often historically associated with progressives. When did gay Republican activists come to be?
CM: The LGBT movement has developed and grown so much from the days of Stonewall and Harvey Milk/Briggs Initiative election – two of the most iconic civil rights struggles for our community. While not referenced often, Harvey Milk was a Republican when he started his activist movement, and then California Governor Ronald Reagan was responsible for the birth of Log Cabin Republicans – the LGBT conservatives in CA that banded together to fight the Briggs Initiative.
MR: Do you not see President Reagan as callous, and possibly homophobic, with his disregard for AIDS [then known as GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, under the false assumption that only sexually active gay men could get it]?
CM: Both Nancy and the President had personal friends who were gay, even some they brought with them to DC – though these weren’t part of the ‘core group’ of political advisors. As for AIDS, nobody really knew what it was at the time. We really had no idea what was going on with the disease and homosexuality was still a very taboo issue. Sure, many look back and criticize Reagan, but at the time we didn’t have the science or the understanding of the LGBT community that we do now.
MR: The Republican Party is sometimes thought to be a harbinger of righteous family values. The recent outing of Roy Ashburn, a Senator from
CM: Even as national scandals continue to erupt on both sides of the aisle, it just reinforces that politics is still a pretty conservative institution, where everybody is being judged and sized up. As long as we continue to sit silently by and continue to be marginalized, we are complacent in the problem. We won’t win the battle every time, but the key is to be visible, participatory, engaged and willing to help be part of the solution. It’s not always easy, but that’s what we do every day at Log Cabin Republicans, and what I personally try to do as a proud openly-gay man with a conservative ideology who loves my country and my party, for better or worse.
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