Is GOProud, the gay Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, “self-loathing?” Michelangelo Signorile, the gay, longtime author, activist, and radio host, says, yes.
“First off, denialists and elitists who believe they are superior to other gays — even if the attitude masks a pitiful self-loathing — are clearly as prevalent as ever in the LGBT movement, except that they can now be out of the closet,” Signorile writes in an Advocate op-ed Wednesday. “Perversely, the fact that we can find such people in GOProud is a measure of our success.”
Signorile writes that GOProud “supports outspokenly anti-equality public figures — from Ann Coulter, who was paid to speak to the group, to Donald Trump, who is opposed to any gay unions—and targeted gay congressman Barney Frank during the 2010 election with an ad that called him “catty,” chalking it up it — including GOProud’s “self-loathing” — to “a desire to be close to power; a hunger for attention and GOP approval; a selfish devotion to Republican “fiscal†policies over civil rights; and a belligerence toward gay activists, whom they seem to detest.”
We learn that “GOProud is opposed to the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which is now law,” and that GOProud and co-founder Chris Baron, “support House speaker John Boehner defending section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in federal appeals court after President Obama announced he believed the law is unconstitutional — though Barron himself is legally married to a man in Washington, D.C. Barron’s husband, to whom he refers a lot in his tweets, is a D.C. teacher who wrote a piece in MetroWeekly about how kids learn to be bullies from adults who bully one another. But there couldn’t possibly be a better example of an adult bullying other adults than Barron tweeting this: ‘The gay left = the American Taliban. Hateful, angry and dumb as shit.’ He’s also tweeted that Andrew Sullivan is ‘fat,’ ‘pathetic,’ and ‘self-important’ and that Meghan McCain is ‘intensely stupid’.”
Signorile, who has done more for his community than almost any other LGBT journalist over the course of his career, looks closely at GOProud, in all their obnoxious self-loathing, self-aggrandizing, self-importance, and puts them in their place.