Nothing captures the imagination like two rich homos betraying their own community. Sarah Maslin Nir got the ball rolling in the New York Times: “They are throwing a $5 million fund-raiser for President Trump this winter, and are quick to make it known that they have the president’s sons’ cellphone numbers on speed dial. They have poured more than $50,000 of their own money into supporting the president, who smiles in photos on the bookshelves of their home. But Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, are not red state evangelicals or die-hard right-wingers. In fact, for years, they were key players among a cohort that Mr. Trump loathes: Manhattan’s liberal elite….
“The couple say they have been condemned not just for hypocrisy, but for what has been seen as a betrayal of their own community, by backing a man who has scaled back LGBT protections.
“They dismiss such concerns. ‘I don’t like identity politics,’ Mr. Eure said.”
Wow! They have Eric Trump on speed dial! He’s right below Satan in the directory.
Maslin Nir goes on to describe the moment of their transformation from Clintonites to Trumpies: “The genesis of the couple’s reversal can be timed to about midnight on Nov. 8, 2016. Inside the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, at Ms. Clinton’s election night event, Mr. White stood watching the returns in an increasingly funereal atmosphere.
“He got in his Chevrolet Suburban and drove to the New York Hilton in Midtown, where Mr. Trump was celebrating his win. ‘I didn’t want to be part of that misery pie; I’m not a wallower in self-pity,’ said Mr. White, who now runs Constellations Group, a strategic consultancy firm. ‘I really believe that once that decision is made, you have to get behind your president.’”
Of all the dim-witted, inane, offensive, ridiculous, and just plain stupid reasons for getting “behind your president.” As far as I can tell, the only thing you could get from being behind Rump is a fart in your face.
Michelangelo Signorile, in The Huffington Post, was beyond offended. In an opinion column called “Why that New York Times profile of the Trump-loving gay couple is so infuriating,” Signorile lambasted the two creeps, and he didn’t have much good to say about the Times either: “That White and Eure can be so morally vacuous as to simply decide they wanted to go with the winner — whoever that may be — and race to the other side of Manhattan to join him at his victory party is almost as jarring as the fact that these men aren’t at all embarrassed to reveal this shallow opportunism to the world.
“Trump has attempted to eviscerate the rights and even the existence of transgender people, and has shown himself over and over again to be a misogynist. His racist policies include separating children from their parents at the border and, now, tear-gassing mothers and children. White and Eure, however, are insulated from those policies and actions by their gender, their wealth, and their whiteness, despite the fact they are members of a demonized minority without federal civil rights protections.
“This is the paper that, during the 2016 campaign, wrongly and recklessly told us Trump had ‘more accepting views on gay issues’ than other Republicans while providing skimpy evidence — and that never apologized for this dubious, harmful reporting. Now here it is seeming to try to validate that by showing us two wealthy, privileged gay men who agree. There’s little context offered in the piece about what Trump has done to the LGBTQ community, or even a mention of Trump’s horrendous ban on transgender people serving in the military — a court challenge that he’s trying to rush to the Supreme Court — nor are these men asked about it.”
It gets worse. As PinkNews reports, Bryan Eure appears to have gone berserk on Instagram: “Eure, who along with his husband Bill White, was condemned on a viral scale after Monday’s feature about their switch from the Democratic Party to supporting Trump’s Republicans with tens of thousands of dollars in donations, apparently wrote on Instagram: ‘transgender is gross.’ The since-deleted reply was aimed at a user who accused him and his husband of being ‘gross’ for not ‘using your wealth to help transgender people.’ In response to another comment stating that there weren’t many gay Trump supporters in the US, Eure allegedly wrote: ‘oh yes there are. And we will win and we will take your little rights away and deport you and gas you and turn you straight while you rot in a cage.’”
“Apparently” and “allegedly” were stuck in there for legal reasons, though it hardly seems necessary given the fact that photos of the vile Instagram posts accompanied the article.
Charming.
It isn’t at all surprising that practically none of the encomia lavished on the late George H.W. Bush, who died last week in boring old Houston (rather than at the family’s rambling seaside manse in lovely Fullabunkport, Maine), even mentioned in passing that he was almost as bad about the AIDS crisis as the man for whom he served as vice president — Ronald Reagan. Of course it would be impossible to be that bad, since Reagan did nothing.
The dependably outraged Mike Signorile in The Huffington Post was the early exception — that is, until the Johnny-come-lately New York Times ran a namby-pamby piece by Liam Stack on the subject, followed by solid pieces from GQ.com, thecu
Signorile writes: “Bush was as captive to the evangelical right on social issues — and thus a decidedly Republican president — as was his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who cultivated religious conservatives as a potent political force and bowed to their anti-LGBTQ agenda as the AIDS epidemic mushroomed in the 1980s.
“Reagan’s history of callously ignoring the epidemic while thousands died is well-documented. Bush, at the outset of his term, promised a ‘kinder, gentler’ presidency than the man he’d served under as vice president. He even gave a speech on the AIDS epidemic in 1990, which was long on compassion but short on strategy and commitment to funding. During the speech, in fact, Urvashi Vaid, an invited guest and then the executive director of the prominent National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, now the National LGBTQ Task Force, took the unprecedented and heroic act of standing up and holding a sign, ‘Talk Is Cheap. AIDS Funding Is Not.’”
And my personal favorite: “Infamously, Bush had said in a television interview that if he had a grandchild who was gay he would ‘love’ the child but would tell the child he wasn’t normal.”
That’s kindness for you. Tell your grandchild you love him or her, but make sure they know they’re a freak. That kind of love isn’t love.
As for Bush and AIDS, ACT UP mainstay Garance Franke-Ruta put it well on thecut.com: “The transition from the Reagan presidency to the Bush one was more one of tone than substance when it came to AIDS, a kinder gentler indifference.”
The headline of Jay Willis’ thoughtful and angry piece on GQ.com — “It’s honest to speak ill of the dead” — reminds me of Bette Davis’ joke (or maybe it was her greatest impersonator Charles Pierce’s) “My mother taught me only to speak good of the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
