The ‘normal gay guys’ of California’s Republican Party

Matthew Craffey knew he was a Republican before he knew he was gay. When he came out at 21, he said the LGBTQ community didn’t understand his conservative lifestyle.

“When I finally came out, I felt like I was able to live my life and be 100% who I am,” he said. “But what I started to realize is, I had a circle of gay friends and I was kind of made fun of all the time for being a Republican, and I had to hold my tongue on a whole host of issues.”

Craffey, now 46, said he realized soon after coming out that being a gay Republican was “at best, a punchline,” and, at worst, friendship-ending in his Southern California hometown.

“I realized that I kind of had to go somewhat back in the closet with my beliefs,” he said.

It’s a niche group, being gay and conservative. Donald Trump only captured 12% of the LGBTQ vote this year, while Kamala Harris earned 86%, according to NBC exit polls. His performance with the bloc significantly worsened from his 2020 run, dropping 15 percentage points, exit polls suggested.

Craffey, who knew he was a Republican by his early teenage years, said he used to feel like he had to keep his political beliefs a secret within the majority-liberal LGBTQ community — until his friend told him about a group of like-minded people.

“I told him, ‘I don’t know what to do. I think I’m gay, but I can’t be gay because I’m a Republican and we’re always told you can’t be gay and a Republican.’ And he just kind of laughed and said, ‘No, there’s gay Republicans. They’re called Log Cabin Republicans.’”

The Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) define themselves as “the nation’s original and largest organization representing LGBT conservatives.” The group was founded in California in the 1970s, and while it has since expanded nationwide, the Golden State remains the heart of Log Cabin with the most chapters of any state by a large margin. Craffey, who works as the senior director of prospect management and development analytics at UCLA, is now on the organization’s national board and formerly served as the state chairman of the Log Cabin Republicans of California.

California Log Cabin Republicans, like Craffey, may constitute a significant portion of the few LGBTQ voters who stuck with Trump this year. They’re a small but vocal group of the electorate with unique interests — namely LGBTQ employment rights, the expansion of the Second Amendment and the international decriminalization of homosexuality — and the Trump-Vance campaign catered to them.

LCR is just one of the niche factions of voters that helped bring Trump to his second victory, alongside Latino men and white women without college degrees. While Republicans have criticized the left’s focus on identity, the rise of these communities indicates a shift toward micro-identity politics in American conservatism under Trump.

Sen. J.D. Vance seemed confident in the Republican ticket’s performance with this specific brand of LGBTQ voters just days before the election. The Ohio senator appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on October 31, telling Rogan he “wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote.”

Bringing up a conversation he had with a friend he called a “gay Reagan Democrat” about current LGBTQ policy debates, he said the gay voters the Trump campaign represented weren’t concerned with what he dubbed “crazy stuff,” such as providing medical procedures to transgender youth.

“They just wanted to be left the hell alone,” Vance said.

This sentiment is echoed across Log Cabin circles, some of whom have embraced Vance’s “normal gay guy” moniker. The campaign’s focus on transgender issues — such as transgender women in sports, youths medically transitioning and public bathroom debates — resonated with LGBTQ Republicans who feel that the community has gone too far in their search for equality.

“I think J.D. Vance said it very well… the normal gay people just want to be left alone,” Gregory Gandrud, treasurer of the California Republican Party, said. “For people who want to live and let live, I think it’s going to be great. For people who are trying to impose themselves on other people, I don’t think there’s going to be much tolerance for that in the Trump administration.”

Gandrud, a Log Cabin board member in California who has been a member of the organization for more than 30 years and also served as a delegate for Trump at the 2020 Republican National Convention, traveled to D.C. for Trump’s inauguration on January 20. While he planned to attend the event in person, he ultimately watched it on television as it was moved indoors due to freezing temperatures.

During Trump’s speech, the president declared that the United States would only recognize two genders, male and female. Later that day, Trump made an executive order codifying the sentiment, which stated “women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” In an interview after the speech, Gandrud said the order “makes perfectly good sense.”

“To me, gender is kind of a polite way to show what your genitals are without showing your genitals,” Ganrud said. “People are free to express themselves however they want, but ultimately, you got the chromosomes that you got.”

Following the Day One denial of recognition for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people, the president issued another order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports in schools on February 5. The announcement was made on National Girls and Women in Sports Day.

The California Log Cabin Republicans are now wholly supportive of Trump, but they haven’t always been. In 2016 the Log Cabin national board elected not to endorse Trump, and the organization’s then-President Gregory T. Angelo told the Advocate their decision was due to “the high degree of uncertainty about what a Trump administration would look like for Log Cabin Republicans and LGBT Americans in general.”

Despite this decision, some state and county chapters — including Los Angeles and Orange County — issued their own endorsements for Trump. In their statement of support, the L.A. chapter wrote they were “excited to unite behind Trump as the most pro-LGBT candidate in our Party’s history, and help defeat Hillary Clinton on November 8th!,” according to the Advocate.

In 2019, the national organization relented and endorsed Trump, and Executive Director Jerri Ann Henry and several group leaders resigned in protest. The then-chairman and vice-chairwoman published a joint op-ed in the Washington Post explaining their reasoning for the endorsement, writing that Trump is “removing gay rights as a wedge issue from the old Republican playbook.”

This schism within the group is indicative of the divisive force of the incoming Trump administration’s ideologies within the LGBTQ community. For some, the former president is the most outspoken ally the Republican Party has ever seen. For others, the way he campaigned, his ties to the religious right and Cabinet picks indicate a bleak future for LGBTQ rights, specifically for transgender people.

“It’s such a far-fetched idea that he wants to hurt gays,” Craffey said. “To me, it’s completely ludicrous, because we actually have met the person. He shows up at our stuff.”

Trump has publicly supported LGBTQ issues, even before his political career. In a 2000 interview with the Advocate about a potential future presidential run, he said he supported amending the Civil Rights Act to include gay rights. He also said that he would “certainly appoint” a gay person to his Cabinet, and he later became the first president to do so after naming Richard Grenell as director of national intelligence. On December 14, the Trump campaign announced Grenell would act as the presidential envoy for special missions in the upcoming administration.

While Trump has flip-flopped on his stance on same-sex marriage, the updated 2024 Republican Party platform no longer defined marriage as between “one man and one woman.” In 2020, Melania Trump said her husband was “the first president to enter the White House supporting gay marriage” in a video posted to LCR’s X account. That was nine days before Trump lost re-election to Joe Biden, who became the highest-ranking national official to publicly back same-sex marriage in 2012.

Trump and the former first lady have also supported Log Cabin and attended the group’s events. Last February, the vice chair and treasurer of the Tennessee Log Cabin Republicans married his now-husband at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate. In 2022, Trump hosted a Log Cabin gala at Mar-a-Lago, where he said “We are fighting for the gay community, and we are fighting and fighting hard.”

Melania Trump won the Log Cabin Republicans’ “Spirit of Lincoln” award in 2021 for her “BE BEST” anti-bullying campaign. The former first lady has been linked to the organization multiple times, although the payments she received coinciding with her appearances at their events sparked controversy in 2024. Gandrud said she also hosted an intimate Log Cabin event at her Manhattan home in Trump Tower last year, with tickets priced at $25,000.

Jason Clark, president of LCR San Francisco and former chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party, said Trump’s political rise acted as an energizing force for LGBTQ people with conservative values.

“[Trump has] really breathed new life and new energy into our chapter, and especially in the LGBT community, where there’s this kind of pervasive, widespread cancellation sort of movement,” he said. “People who were afraid to speak out against things that they thought were just really bad policy or bad ideas, now people are no longer afraid to speak out, and they’re no longer afraid to associate.”

Clark said there has been an “incredible” expansion in the group since Trump’s first run, a pattern other California Log Cabin Republicans also noticed. The group now has 56 chapters nationwide — including 10 across California — compared with just a dozen total in 2016, according to Clark. A chapter, which can be statewide or based in a city or general region, holds events and endorses local and state candidates.

Clark said many new members are unified by their views on transgender issues. Some Log Cabin Republicans choose to shorten the acronym to LGBT, and the group’s official language also forgoes the “Q+,” which stands for queer or questioning, and includes asexual, intersex and other marginal groups in the community.

“There’s a lot of LGBTQ people now who, you know, after gay marriage, they want to kind of put the brakes on some of the stuff that’s going on with what the left is pushing, with transgender issues, things like having biological men play in women’s sports,” he said.

Promises of anti-transgender legislation were a hallmark of Trump’s 2024 campaign, although anti-trans policies remained low on voters’ priority lists according to post-election survey findings. Some of the campaign’s most noticed and replayed advertisements featured photos of a trans athlete playing on a women’s community college basketball team in Northern California over a decade ago. The tagline? “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Republicans across the country deployed similar tactics to play up the issue and frequently promised to keep men out of women’s sports at campaign events. At a Moms for Liberty event in 2023, Trump declared “On Day One, I will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age.”

Neil J. Young, political historian and author of “Coming out Republican: A History of the Gay Right,” said this idea of division in the LGBTQ community along the line of gender conformity is not new. Now, though, debates over public bathrooms, women’s sports and medical transitions have become an integral part of what he calls “respectability politics” in gay Republicanism under Trump.

“[It’s] constructing an acceptable brand of homosexuality that I think now includes not only those historic trends of, again, being gender-conforming, being sort of conservative in appearance and demeanor, but also in having particular politics,” he said. “And I think this is where the trans issue really comes in, because it’s drawing a line between the LGB and the TQ.”

Young notes that LGBTQ conservatives who are accepted by the Republican Party are typically white, gay men. To Trump and Vance, this may be the “normal gay guy” they’re talking about and fighting for — a category that does not encompass transgender people.

“It is its own identity politics,” Young said. “Because what it’s reasserting is whiteness, maleness, Christianness, as normative, and everything else is identitarian.”

To some non-Democratic LGBTQ voters, this stance is enough to turn them off of the Republican Party. Chase Oliver, who was the Libertarian presidential nominee this year, criticized the GOP as “completely adversarial to the LGBTQ community.” Oliver, who is gay, won the party’s nomination over Robert F. Kennedy and campaigned on a platform far from the edgy fringe factions of the party.

“Self-expression is something that needs to be talked about, and that the Republican Party very much tries to restrict, and that includes gender expression,” Oliver said in an interview. “So for me, I think it comes to defending all LGBTQ people, and not just some.”

However, the Log Cabin Republicans assert that gay rights will be protected and furthered for the next four years under Trump. Some, like Craffey, consider fears of anti-LGBTQ legislation implausible.

“This panic, which was voiced eight years ago, is the same stuff. ‘They’re going to put gays in concentration camps, they’re going to round us all up and they’re going to force us into conversion therapy,’” Craffey said. “Literally [the] same panic and scare tactics they put out there, and it never happened. It’s not going to happen this time.”

But for others, especially transgender people, another four years of Trump brings up concerns for the future of their rights. The 2024 GOP platform has a section titled “Republicans Will End Left-wing Gender Insanity,” which promises to “keep men out of women’s sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.”

Even if Trump supports protections on the basis of sexuality, his Supreme Court appointments and Cabinet picks may not. Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ civil rights organization, found that 40% of federal judges appointed by Trump showed a “demonstrable record of anti-LGBTQ+ bias.”

Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, said in 2015 that he would never walk back his opposition to gay marriage. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, signed laws allowing religious discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the workplace and banning “divisive concepts” from public schools, according to a Them article.

“They are convinced that marriage equality is the law of the land, is written in stone, and that the Trump administration is not going to do anything around that,” Young said. “I am not. I am very concerned about the future of marriage equality, and a lot of gay rights that we take for granted.”