īut if his opposition to gay rights was merely “for political purposes,” as the paper suggested, the end result was no different: Thousands of queer people died in the streets during the 1980s while the White House refused to acknowledge them. “Indeed, all the available evidence suggests that Ronald Reagan is a closet tolerant,” concluded the Washington Post. In 1984, the Reagan Administration was the first presidency to host a gay couple in the White House-when Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s interior decorator, Ted Graber, stayed over in the Reagans' private quarters with his partner, Archie Case. ![]() During his time as the governor of California, Reagan opposed a ban on LGBT people teaching in public schools. Before their campaigns proved popular with a great number of Americans, these men’s political ambitions were considered a joke: After all, who would ever vote for a celebrity for president?īut most importantly, Reagan was reportedly a moderate on gay rights in private. Reagan was a well-known actor before he was a politician, while Trump-the son of a businessman-was born into the world of finance, the embodiment of 1980s Wall Street excess (he may as well be ripped out of “Bonfire of the Vanities”). They are two men who don’t fit the traditional image of what a president looks like. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump have a great deal in common. The businessman has been referred to as a “moderate” on the subject of gay rights, with even the New York Times crediting his “more accepting views” on the LGBT community, but if a politician is to be judged by the company he keeps, a Trump presidency stands to be the most brutal assault on the dignity of queer people since Reagan’s. “I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs."īut while publicly courting the votes of LGBT Republicans like Caitlyn Jenner, who recently had a “supportive” call with the billionaire CEO, he has aligned himself with extreme anti-gay factions of the right wing in private. “Thank you to the LGBT community!” he wrote. ![]() Trump, who has criticized the Clintons Foundation’s decision to accept donations from countries with a poor LGBT rights record (even while having business ties to many of the same nations), later reiterated the same point on Twitter. “Ask the gays what they think and what they do, in, not only Saudi Arabia, but many of these countries, and then you tell me: Who's your friend, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?” “The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community-they are so much in favor of what I've been saying over the last three or four days," Trump famously claimed at a Houston rally in June. Since the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, which claimed the lives of 49 people, Trump has been repeatedly trying to sell himself as an ally to the LGBT community-or at least better than Hillary Clinton on gay rights. For someone who claims to be a “friend to the gays,” Donald Trump sure does like to hang around with homophobes.
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