The Gay Right: A Framework for Understanding Right Wing LGBT Organizations

Abstract

While there has been considerable interest in debates about right wing ideas in LGBT movements—military service, marriage, nationalism, white supremacy—there has been comparatively little attention to self-proclaimed right wing LGBT organizations, what I call the “gay right.” Social theory to date offers a fragmented set of theoretical tools to explain them, including homonationalism, post-gay identity, additive intersectionality, and systems justification theory. I propose a two axis framework to unify these theories and map wide ranging diversity within the gay right. This framework is based on both a review of existing theories, and also analysis of 38 gay right organizations in 14 countries. I illustrate the framework with an extended analysis of three gay-right organizations which share a context—the contemporary UK—but have very different politics.

LGBTQ people and movements are often thought of as politically left. This is not surprising; “the gay movement” was consolidated largely during the 1980s and ‘90s through a co-constitutive battle with the Religious Right that placed each on opposing poles in left-right US national politics (Fetner, 2008). Writing about gay movements before then emphasizes their affinities with the New Left and the Democratic Party (e.g. Beemyn, 2003; Robinson, 2005), and today only one in five LGB people in the US identify as “conservative” (Schnabel, 2018). The association of “gay” with “politically left” or “liberal” is so salient that it is common for sociologists to describe “small city gay bars” as “small blue bubbles in a sea of red” or to design quantitative measures that make “pro gay” politically “liberal” by definition (Hadler & Symons, 2018; Mattson & Sparks, 2018). When progressive activists say that conservative gay activism is nonexistent and logically impossible, sociologists credulously believe them (Bernstein et al., 2018).

Yet gay people with right wing politics exist. What is more, they have operated a wide variety of political organizations spanning at least 50 years and 13 countries, even forming international coalitions like the European Centre-Right LGBT Alliance. Some, like the US Log Cabin Republicans and the UK LGBTories, support major, center-right political parties. Others, like the Swedish GaySVP and the US National Socialist League, are far-right, neo-Nazi organizations. Right wing gay organizations are generally absent from sociological scholarship (for two notable exceptions, see Buchanan, 2022; Rogers & Lott, 1997). Halberstam (2011) argues that their absence is deliberate; in addition to writing history, “gay and lesbian scholars have also hidden history, unsavory histories, and have a tendency to select from historical archives only the narratives that please,” hiding for example, “the history of relations between homo-sexuality and fascism” (2011, p. 148). This epistemology of ignorance has resulted in a widespread, longstanding, mistaken belief among both scholars and activists that being gay necessarily entails radical political implications (Bersani, 1987). To the broad array of academic literature on LGBT politics which assumes, by omission or often explicitly that sexual minorities are inherently progressive, this paper makes two contributions. The first is the important corrective that no, being gay does not always imply progressive politics, and the second is a structured framework with empirical examples of five ways that gay people bring together their sexuality with right wing politics.

There is some existing scholarship that can be used to understand the gay right, although much of it was developed using only center-left cases. Because this work often draws on different examples and disciplines, it comes to related but fundamentally contradictory conclusions. I synthesize the major strands of theory in this space into an overarching framework that organizes diverse theories and cases of the gay right in relation to one another. Rather than asking which theory is correct about the gay right, I argue that they are each describing different parts of a broader, heterogeneous phenomenon. There are multiple ways to be gay and right wing. Evaluating disparate cases together offers insights into the theories’ boundaries and limitations, such as when self-described homosexual nationalists are not “homonationalist,” or when when the oft-derided additive approach to intersectionality does accurately describe people’s experience. Comparing diverse cases also highlights factors that were not as salient in a theory’s initial formulation, such as role of class in producing the sense of a “post-gay era.”

In the next section, I outline my framework and briefly review how a variety of existing theoretical work fits into it. Then I describe my methodology for collecting data on 38 cases of gay right political organizations. From there, I provide more in-depth analysis of three contemporary British cases that highlight the utility of my framework for understanding variation in the gay right. Finally, I offer some conclusions and directions for future work.

Two Unwritten Axes of Theory

Theories and cases of the gay right can be usefully mapped along two axes, depicted in Table 1, based on how they answer the questions, “should there be such a thing as ‘gay interests?’” and if so, “how are they related to the right’s interests?” This approach places them all on the same level of analysis and in the same rhetorical frame. It enables comparisons across theories that are otherwise difficult to compare, as some focus on individual psychology, while others emphasize cultural schemas, and still more examine global structures. Although I will show existing explanations of the gay right differ in important ways, very little work has been done to bring them into conversation. Table 1 situates prior theories along these two axes. Table 2 situates selected empirical examples along the same axes.

Table 1:

Two axes of theory for the gay right

	Gays have political interests qua gays	Homonormativity Gays should/do not have unique or distinct interests
Gay interests are identical to the right’s interests	Gay as extreme - Systems Justification Theory - Homo-supremacy	Assimilation
Gay interests align with the right, but for uniquely gay reasons	Homonational rhetoric - Freedom with Violence
Gay interests are relatively unimportant for politics	Tension - Additive intersectionality - Identity integrators	Post-gay - Beyond the closet - Identity centaurs

Table 2:

Selected gay right organizations arranged by their views on “gay interests”

	Gays have political interests qua gays	Homonormativity Gays should/do not have unique or distinct interests
Gay interests are identical to the right’s interests	Gay as extreme - Man2ManAlliance.org - The Homo and the Negro (O’Meara, 2012)	Assimilation - LGBTory before marriage equality - National Socialist League (US) - Log Cabin Republicans before 2016
Gay interests align with the right, but for uniquely gay reasons	Homonational rhetoric - EDL LGBT Division - #twinks4trump
Gay interests are relatively unimportant for politics	Tension - LGBT* in UKIP - GayLib (France) - LGBT for Trump	Post-gay - LGBTory after marriage equality - LGBTory (Canadian version)

Gay as extreme

The top left cell, labeled “gay as extreme,” encompasses situations where gay people are said to have interests because they are gay, but those interests are also said to be identical to the interests of the (straight) right wing. Here lies social psychology’s Systems Justification Theory. Like the concept “internalized homophobia,” this theory suggests that gay people adopt both the right’s values (e.g. children should be raised in particular kinds of families), and also the right’s view that gay people are deficient in those values, therefore they support and justify the systems of their own oppression (Blankenship et al., 2017). In the same cell, but with very different views, are a what I call “homo-supremacist” theories. These involve claims that there is something inherently right wing or even fascist about homosexuals (the preferred term in this literature) (e.g. Adorno, 1974; Halberstam, 2011; Robinson, 2005, p. 81; Theweleit, 1978/1989). Bersani summarizes the point: “right-wing politics can, for example, emerge quite easily from a sentimentalizing of the armed forces or of blue-collar workers” or from eroticizing domination through sadomasochism (1987, p. 206). Here, gay people are said to be better at or have a uniquely gay investment in the values of the right.

Homonational rhetoric

Gay interests need not be constructed as identical to right wing interests in order to ally with them. They may instead form an alliance around the idea of a shared enemy. This is the middle cell on the left of Table 1. One way of theorizing this, homonationalism, comes from queer of color critique. Homonationalism generally refers to the belief that gay people and the (Western) nations we belong to share a common enemy, usually Muslims or immigrants, who are framed as the enemy of both the nation and gays (Puar, 2007, 2013). Here, gay identity provides a distinct reason for supporting nationalist agendas: gays are under threat because of their sexuality, distinct from any national identity. Without using the framework of homonationalism, numerous scholars have documented white gays allying with conservatives against people of color in local and domestic politics, such as when gayborhood residents work to expel people of color or when Black voters are wrongly blamed for anti-gay ballot measures (e.g. Greene, 2014; Hanhardt, 2013; Reddy, 2011).

The term “homonationalism” has traveled to a wide array of meanings and cases (Puar, 2013). Broad definitions have lead many to describe all “right-wing leaders who also happen to be gay” as engaging in homonationalism, even when their sexuality was entirely absent from their politics and only revealed to the public after death (e.g. Halberstam, 2011, p. 161). Reducing “homonationalism” to simply “homos” engaged in “nationalism” voids the term of its analytic insight, that nationalist politics are sometimes done in the name of protecting gay people, that “‘How well do you treat your homosexuals?’ [is] a current paradigm through which nations, populations and cultures are evaluated in terms of their ability to conform to a universalised notion of civilisation,” and that one need not be a “homo” to deploy homonational logic (Puar, 2010). Puar argues that homonationalism is a field of power that pervades the whole Western political spectrum (Puar, 2013). It is a fools errand, she argues, to try and determine what is and is not homonational, because homonationalism is a broader condition under which all individuals and organizations operate. For her part, Puar draws her examples from the left, avoiding the study of “conservative LGBTQ discourses” in favor of critiquing the racist, nationalist aspects of “feminist, queer,… progressive, [and] liberal multicultural discourses” (2007, p. 40).

In this paper, I depart from Puar’s use of the term in two ways. First, I examine self-avowed right wing organizations. Second, I show that it is analytically useful to ask when organizations do and do not use homonational rhetoric. Homonationalism may be the global state of affairs, but that does not mean everyone endorses or participates in it equally. My empirical, sociological approach to this queer theory reveals, unexpectedly, that some right wing gay organizations resist their own political party’s enthusiastic exploitation of homonationalism. To see that, we need to distinguish between those who rhetorically leverage homonationalism and those who do not.

Tension

In the bottom left cell of Table 1, labeled tension, are configurations where gays possess distinct interests from the right, but they are either overridden by other issues or relatively unimportant in political position-taking. Brekhus’ gay identity “integrators” fit here: their “values reflect the standpoint of individuals who have been shaped not only by their experiences as members of an oppressed group but by their experience as members of several dominant groups as well,” and their “attitudes reflect a mix of one liberalizing spice (gayness) and several conservativising buffers (middle-classness, suburbanness, etc.)” (Brekhus, 2003, p. 79,80). In one of the only sociological studies of a self-professed right wing LGBT organization to date, Rogers and Lott (1997) explain the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) by citing Collins’ “matrix of domination” and quoting Weeks: “Each of us lives with a variety of potentially contradictory identities, which battle within for allegiance: as men or women, black or white, straight or gay…” (Weeks, 1990, p. 88). For Rogers and Lott, LCR members are Republicans because their interests as white, middle class men won out over their contradictory gay interests and identity. Others have made similar remarks (Bersani, 1987; Lewis, 2016; Lorde & Star, 1988/2017).

Homonormativity

The right side column of Table 1 describes theories which assert that gay people do not or ought not have distinct interests by virtue of being gay. Positions in this column of the table fit within the theoretical framework of homonormativity, a term coined by Duggan (2003) but elaborated earlier by others (notably Smith, 1994; Vaid, 1995; Warner, 1999). Critics of homonormativity often cite Sullivan’s Virtually Normal as its clearest articulation:

ending the military ban and lifting the marriage bar are simple, direct, and require no change in heterosexual behavior… leaving bigots their freedom. This politics marries the clarity of liberalism with the intuition of conservatism…. It makes a clear, public statement of equality while leaving all the inequalities of emotion and passion to the private sphere, where they belong…. It banishes the paradigm of victimology…. Its objectives are in some sense not political at all…. It says something about the status of homosexuals in our society that we now have to be political in order to be prepolitical…. We have to embrace politics if only to be free of it (1995, pp. 186–187).

Such politics “promis[e] the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture” in which there are no political interests inherent to gay identity (Duggan, 2003, p. 50). When this promise is unrealized, as it was for Sullivan in 1995, homonormativity takes the form of calls for assimilation (the top right cell of Table 1). Gay people ought to be granted formal equality in the form of ending discriminatory laws, in order that we may enter into an unchanged, normal, straight life. Without this formal equality, a temporary political movement for assimilation may be necessary, but ultimately the goal is for gay identity to have no independent interests or political implications.

This ultimate apolitical state has been theorized under multiple names. Seidman and collaborators refer to it as living “beyond the closet” (Seidman et al., 1999). A decade later, Ghaziani declared that homonormative experiences and cultural frames are widespread enough to merit naming this the “post-gay era” (2011). In answer to the question “what might post-gay politics look like?”, Ghaziani concludes they look like Sullivan’s vision: “gay political organizations often function more as social groups than as angry activist groups” (Ghaziani, 2011 quoting; Sullivan, 2005, p. 19). Brekhus’ (2003) “identity centaurs” are post-gay. Like the mythical beast made up of two distinct animals, an identity centaur “does not see his gayness as necessarily flavoring his tastes in nonsexual areas” like politics (2003, 107). Among the suburban gay men Brekhus identifies as centaurs, “several defined themselves as Republicans” and “even those who identified as Democrats said they did so for reasons other than their sexuality” (2003, 85).

While most theorists avoid calling homonormativity “right wing,” in part because they study self-described apolitical and center-left cases, Duggan argues that the “nonpolitics” of homonormativity are actually the politics of “the gay right wing, self-constituted as the new center,” because “Homonormativity entails a rhetorical recoding of key terms in the history of gay politics: ‘equality’ becomes narrow, formal access to a few conservatizing institutions, ‘freedom’ becomes impunity for bigotry and vast inequalities… and democratic politics itself becomes something to be escaped” (Duggan, 2003, pp. 65–66). This recoding substitutes the interests of the right in place of uniquely gay ones, a conservative political project arguing that there should be no gay political project.

Toward synthesis

The two theoretical axes I lay out in Table 1 illustrate part of why these theories have had difficulty relating to one another: they are built from cases with different logics. Puar is writing about (center left) gays who see Muslims as their enemy, while Ghaziani is writing about (mostly center left) gays who believe they no longer have any enemies. They differ over whether “gay interests” as such exist. Along the other axis, Theweleit is writing about Nazis who saw Nazism as the apotheosis of their homosexuality, while Brekhus is writing about people (both Democrat and Republican) who think their interests as gays are wholly unrelated to politics. They differ over how gay interests relate to right wing interests. These axes also highlight an oft overlooked distinction between homonationalism and homonormativity. Most commentary on homonationalism rightly points out that it draws on rhetoric of homonormativity: (certain) gay subjects are integrated with (heterosexual) national identity in order to consolidate a morally superior “us” positioned against a racial, religious, and/or immigrant “them.” However, homonormativity yearns for or declares that gay is not a politically meaningful identity with collective, shared interests. Homonationalism is premised precisely on the existence of such interests in order to claim, for example, a conflict between “gay” and “Muslim.” Moreover, this opposition is figured as a “civilizational” culture war which absolutely does not “leave bigots their freedom” or “banish the paradigm of victimology” (Brubaker, 2017; Sullivan, 1995).

Using my framework, these theoretical tensions become clear. In order to resolve them, scholars will need to incorporate empirical analysis of a wider range of gay political organizing into our research. In what follows, I provide an overview of the breadth of gay right organizing and review several cases to illustrate the insights studying the gay right may generate.

Methods

I study organizations that violate the assumption that gay and politically right are at odds. I am not interested here in quantitative estimates of prevalence or distribution, but rather in testing and extending theories of gay politics by using them to grapple with diverse cases. As such, I sought out variation rather than representativeness while collecting data. In exploring the world of possible cases, I cast a wide net for all things which were commonly labeled “conservative” or “right” and also “gay,” “LGBT,” or “homosexual,” regardless of time and place. I used internet search engines, news, academic publications, social media, and referrals from archivists and experts in the field to expand my set of cases. I recursively followed links, footnotes, and mentions in each case to find more cases. For the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality (UK) and National Socialist League (US), I drew on paper archives and catalogs of their documents. For early US groups, I often relied on digital archives of contemporary local periodicals. In total, I verified the existence of more than 60 examples of the gay right (38 are formal organizations listed in Table 3 which I focus on in this article; the rest are prominent individuals or loose-knit groups that I set aside). The organizations are generally Western—their countries and parties are listed in Table 3. My search was limited by language¹; preservation and indexing of historical materials; and national, historical, and cultural limits to the concepts “right wing” and “gay.” The cases I identified have in common the experience of existing at an intersection that is generally thought of as contradictory, but are otherwise deliberately as diverse as possible. While it is surely systematically missing some cases, to my knowledge, this is the first attempt at a comprehensive enumeration of gay right organizations.

Table 3:

Partial list of gay right organizations

Founded	Defunct	Name	Revival of	Party or group	Country
2017		Deplorable Pride		Republican	USA
2016		Open Christian Democrats (öppna Kristdemokrater)		KD	Sweden
2016		Gays Against Sharia	EDL LGBT Division		UK
2016		Gays for Trump		Republican	USA
<2016		Rainbow Network (CD&V-Rainbownetwork)		CD&V	Belgium
2015		PP Diversidade		Progressive Party	Brazil
2015		LGBTory		Conservative	Canada
2014		Alternative Homosexuals (Alternative Homosexuelle - AHO)		AfD	Germany
2013		European Centre-Right LGBT Alliance			[Europe]
2013		American Unity Fund		Republican	USA
2013		Gay Conservatives of Color (GCOC)		Republican / Libertarian	USA
<2013		Open Right (Åpne Høyre)		Høyres	Norway
2012		LGBTQ* in UKIP (Renamed LGBT* in UKIP in 2013)		UKIP	UK
2011		Pride in the Likud (Ga’ava BaLikud)		Likud	Israel
2010		National Rainbow Group - Kasary (Kansallinen sateenkaariryhmä)		NCP	Finland
2010		GaySVP		SVP	Switzerland
2010	<2016	LGBT Division		EDL	UK
2009	2014	GOProud		Republican	USA
2006		LGBTory (LGBT+ Conservatives after 2016)	TORCHE	Conservative	UK
2004		LGBT Network		Centre Party	Sweden
2004	2005	Abe Lincoln Black Republican Caucus (ALBRC)		Republican	USA
2002		GayLib		UMP until 2013, UDI until 2018, MR after 2018	France
2001	2003	Gays Against Zionism (GAZ)		White Power	USA
2000	2006	Republican Unity Coalition		Republican	USA
1999	2013	Lesbains and Gays in the Union (LSU)		CDU	Germany
1999	<2006	American Resistance Corps (ARC)		White Power	USA
<1999		La Plataforma Popular Gay		Partido Popular	Spain
1998		Outright Libertarians		Libertarian	USA
1991	2003	Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality (TORCHE)	CGHE	Conservative	UK
1980		LGBT Liberals (HBT-Liberaler)		Liberalerna	Sweden
1980	1990	CGHE	CGHE	Conservative	UK
1979		Gaymoderaterna (renamed Open Moderates in 2003)		Moderates	Sweden
1978		Log Cabin Republicans (LCR)		Republican	USA
1977	1987	Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights (CRIR)		Republican	USA
1976	<1980	Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality (CGHE)		Conservative	UK
1974	1984	National Socialist League		Neo-Nazi	USA
1974	?	Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club (San Diego)		Republican	USA
1971	1981	Gay Voters’ League		Mixed	USA

I systematically analyzed the cases, organizing and reorganizing them along dimensions including time period, geographic area, class, audience, issue choice, political ideology, and fit with existing theories. It rapidly became clear that fit with theories could vary considerably between organizations even within the context of a single time and place, and that organizations with very different time, place, and politics may nevertheless overlap considerably in their fit with existing theories. To illustrate, I describe three focal organizations from the same context—the United Kingdom leading up to the 2015 general election—and highlight their parallels with organizations in other contexts.

While on a year long grant to conduct fieldwork in 2014-2015, I gathered data on the three British organizations; “LGBTory,” “LGBT* in UKIP,” and the “English Defense League (EDL) LGBT Division.” I collected each organization’s public self-presentations, focusing on the three year period from the campaign for marriage in England and Wales (passed in July 2013) through the May 2015 General Election. This span includes three distinct periods of UK gay activism: a large gay campaign (for marriage), a large general campaign (for elections), and the relatively quiet period between them. I gather four types of documents: 1) social media posts by the official Twitter and facebook accounts for each group; 2) coverage in news outlets; 3) video and audio clips of group representatives; and 4) the LGBTory.co.uk website, which included public statements, reports, newsletters, and fliers. The other groups did not have websites at the time.

I downloaded all social media posts made by each group using the Twitter and facebook APIs in summer, 2015. Posts that were deleted before this would not be included. In my analysis of posts and replies, I did not see evidence of significant deletions such as mentions of controversial material being taken down or references to posts that were not in the data I collected. I followed the protocol described by Schilt and Westbrook (2009) for gathering an exhaustive archive of relevant news coverage through repeated and refined searches of Google News. After this systematic search, I followed the links and references in all the documents I had, leading to the collection of unindexed items such as YouTube videos of speeches at rallies, podcasts, and a third party recording of a BBC 4 radio interview. I downloaded every page and document on the LGBTory website manually in order to immerse myself in the data. The number and kinds of documents I collected are outlined in Table 4.

Table 4:

Archive documents by type

Documents
Tweets
LGBTory	3,195
LGBT* in UKIP	1,606
Total	4,801
Facebook Posts
EDL LGBT Division	3,054
LGBTory	2,262
LGBT* in UKIP	532
Total	5,848
LGBTory.co.uk
Articles	115
Newsletter Emails	23
Government Documents	16
Reports	7
Misc.	16
Total	177
News & Media
Total	68
Total Documents	10,894

I conducted multiple close read-throughs of the archive, in chronological order, systematically coding issue choice (e.g. gay marriage, hate crimes, school bullying) using a two-step open and structured coding process (Emerson et al., 2011). Using a more linguistic discourse analysis approach, I also coded documents for who the subjects and objects of discussion were (e.g. Parliament as a subject making laws that effect gay people as an object) and how they were framed (e.g. gay people as beneficiaries of good policy). I also draw on hour-long interviews I conducted with two LGBTory Executive Council members in Summer 2015.² These interviews offered insight into internal organizational dynamics and allowed me to test my initial impressions of the archive data.

My data reflect public facing movement strategies and framing, but they do not necessarily reflect the views and motivations of members. As gay, conservative political organizations, these groups engage in considerable amounts of identity discourse, putting forward visions of what it means to be gay and conservative and fostering notions of group membership. Thus, while my data are mostly organization-level, I refer at times to how organizations “construct identity.” For example, consider the t-shirts LGBT political organizations wore to Pride Parades. LGBT+ Labour brought shirts that said “never kissed a Tory,” framing LGBT identity and sexuality as fundamentally at odds with Tory politics. LGBTory brought shirts that said “I’ve come out… I’m a Tory.” This slogan turns the stigma of having Tory politics as a gay person on its head, analogizing the oppression gay people face for having conservative politics to the oppression gay people face for their sexuality. It positions being Tory as the same kind of legitimate, vulnerable identity as being gay.

Findings

While numerous theorists propose what I have labeled “gay as extreme” in Table 1, I was unable to find any formal political organizations operating on those principles or espousing that rhetoric. This does not mean those theories do not describe real phenomena—I found books, websites, and individuals promoting this position—but those people do not seem to form organizations around these beliefs.

Homonational rhetoric

Sometimes gay right organizations use homonational rhetoric to align gay interests with those of the right. This framing posits that gay people are allies of or wards in need of protection by the right, such as during the 2016 #Twinks4Trump campaign, which combined images of “young queer men with slender and hairless frames, … virginal appearance and youthful purity” alongside portrayals of US presidential candidate “Trump as a protective shield against the supposedly ominous anti-queer ideologies of racialized, foreign others” (Hatfield, 2018, p. 154,156). One of the most intensive examples of homonational organizing on the gay right comes from the English Defence League’s LGBT Division.

The English Defence League (EDL) is a far right organization known for anti-Muslim protests, conspiracy theories, and bloody clashes with the police and left wing antifascist groups. It arose in 2009 as a working class, grassroots movement (Oaten, 2014). They actively differentiate themselves from other far right movements by nominally supporting Israel, women’s rights, gay rights, and other progressive causes. Most EDL actions and rhetoric nevertheless align with the far right, extolling the virtues of (White) English culture and condemning Muslims and immigrants (Garland & Treadwell, 2010). The LGBT Division was formed in March 2010, and since then a few large rainbow flags have appeared at most EDL protests (Phillips, 2010).

The EDL ally themselves with other groups around their primary cause: anti-Muslim racism. In one of their internet radio broadcasts (“Kev Carroll,” 2013), the following exchange takes place between hosts:

Speaker 1: I’m sick and tired of them [Muslims] phoning into radio shows and telling the host that all homosexuals must be hanged.

Speaker 2: Wait, ‘beheaded’ was the expletive.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he said beheaded. Yeah. See even he doesn’t understand his own so-called religion. They don’t behead them necessarily. They’re hanged from cranes.

Speaker 2: Exactly. We’ve seen that in Iran, haven’t we?

The LGBT Division uses the same homonational rhetoric as the EDL generally. For instance, in response to critics of Israeli government actions they write, “Idiotic left-wing Queers just don’t get it! It’s Israel they should and must support, the ONLY country in the middle east where the LGBT community and all sorts of minorities actually have equal rights, instead the side with the islamo fascist who kill gays [sic].”³ They deploy other homonationalist tropes as well with statements like, “manuals of sharia law… encourage paedophilia and violence against children.”⁴ The Division’s Facebook page posts graphic descriptions and images of violence against gay people by Muslims, both real and imagined. While they claim repeatedly that “the EDL is a peaceful human rights movement,”⁵ calls for extreme violence against Muslims in the name of defending the West and its “tolerant” liberalism are common. Some are nothing short of genocidal: “I’ve said all along, Afghanistan should have been nuked before 9/11 even happened.”⁶ Division rhetoric is so extreme that Twitter (but not facebook) banned multiple accounts made by the group during my data collection.

Nearly all of the Facebook posts, Youtube videos, and speeches at protests from the EDL LGBT Division portray Muslims as violent threats to gay people, both in the UK and around the world. The handful of posts that do not include this extreme homonational rhetoric are either updates about EDL protests and events (which are designed to stoke anti-Muslim hate), or announcements like “Happy St. George’s Day.”⁷ This single minded focus leaves little room for discussing other LGBTQ related issues. My coding for issue choice did flag a small number of posts with other topics like employment discrimination. Invariably, such posts turned out like this one: “This teacher was sacked for having parents complain about his Homosexuality. Most where muslim complaints and some hard line christians. It is illegal to sack someone because of their sexuality [sic].”⁸ Although nominally about employment discrimination, it is framed primarily as an example of Muslims hurting a homosexual man and flouting British law. At times when most UK LGBTQ organizations were calling attention to other discrimination cases that could not be blamed on Muslims, the Division was silent.

Tension

Another common explanation for the gay right is that liberal gay interests plus conservative race, class, and gender interests—additive intersectionality—balance out on the conservative side. Such individuals and movements live with an internal contradiction between their sexual and other interests. It can be difficult to find evidence that movements actually experience this sense of contradiction, rather than constructing their sexuality and politics in the non-contradictory ways through, for example, homonational rhetoric. One clear indication of internal conflict comes when gay right individuals and organizations leave their political affiliations because of the tension. For example, the French center right organization GayLib has changed political parties twice after declaring moral objections to the right wing policies of parties it had been in. Prominent organizers in LCR, GOProud, and LGBT for Trump admitted their disappointment that the US president did not live up to campaign promises: “I never thought that Donald Trump was an anti-gay homophobe…. But we’ve all learned a lot about who he really is… this administration will go down as the most anti-LGBT in history” (Suebsaeng & Stein, 2017). In cases like these, activists say that they believed that supporting right wing parties was in their interests as LGBTQ people and later realized that it was not. In leaving, they reveal the contradiction they had been living with, that others are likely still living with. Leaving also reveals that, at least some of the time, the contradiction cannot be maintained forever and is instead resolved by parting ways. The UK Independence Party’s (UKIP) gay interest group is the clearest example.

UKIP campaigns on a narrow platform of populist, anti-EU, and anti-Muslim politics. Party leader Nigel Farage gave an interview on Fox News that is typical of party rhetoric. In it, he accuses Muslims of pedophilia, violence against women, and taking over entire British cities with Sharia law.⁹ UKIP’s primary policy initiative, Brexit, succeeded and has had dramatic implications for the UK.

The interest group LGBT* in UKIP is formally recognized by the party. It articulates positions on a wide array of LGBTQ political issues, including bans on homosexuality in six countries, adoption, sex education, blood donation, trans healthcare, HIV awareness, gay marriage, homophobia in sports, hate crime, pardons for sodomy convictions, youth homelessness, suicide, violence against women, asylum, conversion therapy, and more. LGBT* in UKIP prepared multiple policy recommendations for inclusion in the party’s 2015 Manifesto. They advocate a broad and specifically gay political agenda. In almost every case, however, party leadership overrules them. UKIP was the only party not to mention any LGBTQ issues in its manifesto, a move LGBT* in UKIP subsequently defended on twitter: “Equality is not about putting people in to labelled groups, its about treating everyone EQUALLY. The #UKIP manifesto Is fine example of that.”¹⁰ The party opposes gay marriage, and LGBT* in UKIP makes it clear that “Officially we have no separate opinion on this. Special Interest groups must follow Party Policy.”¹¹ While UKIP nominally recognizes and supports its gay interest group, the party does not substantively support any of the group’s proposals. LGBT* in UKIP downplay this contradiction by defending the party’s decisions not to pursue their own proposals.

Surprisingly, LGBT* in UKIP do not take up the one issue party leadership is most likely to support them on. They do not talk about Muslims or immigrants as posing a threat to gay people or the UK generally, even though straight party leadership and other gay organizations frequently do. That is, LGBT* in UKIP do not deploy homonational rhetoric. They explicitly mention Islam or Muslims only six times in over 2,000 social media posts. Twice, they condemn specific Muslim individuals for advocating violence against gay people. Three times they boast about running a Muslim candidate for European Parliament. Once they write “We are pleased anti gay Islamists are losing the battle to keep the Muslim community ‘straight’. So many are proudly #LGBT & #Muslim. #UKIP.”¹² This demonstrates further dissonance between this gay right group and its party.

Gay people face open hostility from UKIP candidates. Over a three year period, LGBT* in UKIP campaigned to have eight UKIP candidates sanctioned for anti-gay comments and slurs. It is little surprise that the group faces accusations that they offer a veneer of respectability to an otherwise clearly anti-gay party (“smokescreening”). They defend themselves with tweets like, “show us where we’ve smokescreened and not tackled homophobic (now ex-)members?”¹³ This constant battle with and for the party takes a toll on group members. LGBT* in UKIP’s first chair quit after three years, resulting in the headline “Former Chair of UKIP’s Gay Group Calls the Party a ‘Cult’ that ‘Entertains Bigots’” (Strudwick, 2015). Three years later his replacement also quit, stating that her “grievances have been well documented on multiple occasions over the course of numerous months… It is unfortunate that [we] are repeatedly let down by those who fail to act against prejudice.”¹⁴ UKIP’s MEP Nikki Sinclaire, a lesbian trans woman, pursued and won a discrimination case against the party after they pushed her out for refusing to work with the anti-gay far right (Press Association, 2010).

Homonormativity, from assimilation to post-gay

LGBTory UK¹⁵ evolved across a range of homonormative positions during the 2010s. The Conservative Party (Tories) led a coalition government before the 2015 election, and held an outright majority after it. Since the early 2000s, Tory leadership formally recognizes and consults with LGBTory, making it one of the most politically powerful gay right groups in the world. Many gay right groups belong to fringe politics, and even the oldest and wealthiest center right groups, like the American Log Cabin Republicans, are generally not formally recognized or consulted by their parties. LGBTory regularly boasted during the 2015 election that Conservatives had more out LGBT candidates than any other party. The party materially supports gay interests: for example gay marriage became legal in 2013 with support from a Conservative prime minister. Because of the UK’s ongoing colonial history, their power extends beyond their borders: during an interview, one of LGBTory’s council members described their involvement with writing legislation to decriminalize homosexuality in Northern Cyprus. Tory leadership tends to be overwhelmingly ruling and upper-middle class individuals.

Prior to marriage equality, LGBTory relied on the rhetoric of assimilation. It has existed, intermittently and under various names, since 1977. Until 2013, it primarily called for gay people to be allowed access to conservative institutions and culture, a call that the Tory government echoed in a limited way from 1987 onward (Smith 1994). From 2000 to 2013, LGBTQ rights in the UK expanded dramatically to include military service, civil partnerships, adoption, employment non-discrimination, marriage, and more. LGBTory campaigns for each aspect of formal equality relied heavily on assimilation rhetoric. Their website frequently quotes their elected officials to this effect: “I look at the marriage that my parents have—45 years and going strong—and I aspire to the same thing…. I want the same things.” “I assure noble Lords that in the main I really am exactly the same as them, except that I happen to love a man…. We do not want different institutions; we want the same institutions.”¹⁶ All call for assimilation: participation the “same institutions” by people who are “exactly the same” and “aspire to” the straight lives around them. There is nothing distinctly gay in their framing of these values: instead, they endorse conservative, straight values as universally desirable.

While LGBTory framed marriage as a small-c conservative value, they reject a correspondence between gay interests and political sides. Instead, they regularly thanked their Labour and Liberal Democrat counterparts for working together, attended joint events with them, and posed together for pictures. Months after the campaign for marriage was over, LGBTory shared on facebook and Twitter, “In keeping with tradition, we also send Christmas wishes to our friends and cross-Party colleagues in @LGBTLabour and @LGBTLD.”¹⁷ Citing LGBTory Patron Alan Duncan, the Guardian argues that “Both gay men and Conservatives come in many different varieties, you can make only the loosest of generalisations about either, and it is thus not surprising that there is some intersection between the two” (Davis, 2012). With t-shirt slogans like “I’ve come out… I’m a Tory” and “I kissed a Tory,” their messaging is not that they support Tory politics because they are gay, but rather that being a Tory is allowable for people who are gay (in contrast to LGBT+ Labour’s “never kissed a Tory” t-shirts and stickers or the EDL’s “should and must support” Israel rhetoric).

In the two years after gay marriage was legalized, LGBTory’s activism declined in both frequency and depth of engagement. As one of their council members explained to me, they felt there was little left to do: “equal marriage – not that that’s the pinnacle or the end of LGBT rights – [but] it’s pretty close to it.” For them, the UK “has become … the shining beacon of LGBT rights.” They continued to fundraise, publish newsletters, post on social media, organize social events for members, and attend Pride parades. Whenever something gay appeared in political news, LGBTory quickly mentioned it in social media. Announcements like “Progress in Vietnam as ban on same-sex marriage lifted” with a link to a news report were routine.¹⁸ In this way, they a engaged with even more issues and countries than LGBT* in UKIP did during the same time. But their engagement in nearly every case was limited to a single day: one or two tweets and sometimes a paragraph in the next monthly newsletter announcing things that already happened. Unlike their UKIP counterparts who put forward numerous proposals, LGBTory almost never proposed action or policy after the Marriage Act.

Nevertheless, straight Tory leadership did pursue a number of pro-LGBTQ policies during this time on their own initiative. For example, the 2015 Conservative Party Manifesto makes two promises for gay people: enhancements to hate crime legislation and pardoning all people convicted under outdated sodomy laws. Before the manifesto was published, LGBTory repeatedly ridiculed the Labour Party on Twitter for advocating pardons, arguing in terms of fiscal responsibility that reviewing centuries of cases would be expensive. After the manifesto came out, one LGBTory Council member told me they were “not impressed” by it. The provisions were not LGBTory proposals. When I asked how the provisions ended up in the manifesto if they did not come from LGBTory, they speculated, “somebody who was writing our manifesto was thinking ‘we need to put something in for the gays,’” adding, “I think it was it was the worst thing we could have put in.” While this Council member liked some of the LGBTQ foreign policy initiatives Tories had pursued, such as supporting Russian gay rights groups, they attributed the idea for and execution of those initiatives to Prime Minister David Cameron, not LGBTory.

After marriage, this post-gay right wing organization has no political agenda of its own, even when the party they are affiliated with does carry out a gay-specific agenda. After leadership announces each policy, LGBTory publicly celebrates with tweets like, “Equalities Minister @Maria_MillerMP has confirmed that the UK govt is supporting Russian gay rights’ groups” and “Conservative Education Secretary Nicky Morgan MP announces £2m to tackle homo- bi- & transphobic bullying in schools.”¹⁹ LGBTory also stopped publicly criticizing pardons after they were put into the manifesto.

By selectively focusing on only the people and issues already supported by cisgender, heterosexual Conservatives, LGBTory is able to justify its claim to be post-gay, with no important battles left to fight. On exception is Zoë Kirk-Robinson, who served in the roll of LGBTory Trans Officer for a year. She authored two detailed reports and a number of “LGBTory news” posts about the challenges facing trans people in the UK, including immigration, prisons, the NHS, employment, housing, and a loophole in the Equal Marriage Act called the “spousal veto.” The spousal veto allows people to prevent their spouses from transitioning gender by refusing to convert their marriage between the legally separate categories straight marriage and gay marriage. Kirk-Robinson’s agenda was regularly undermined by the other Council members, all of whom seemed to be cisgender men. Unlike most posts on their website, hers were usually followed by a disclaimer: “The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent LGBTory, or the views of its members. If you disagree … please email us.” In person, one of the other Council members was clear about his opposition to advocacy on trans issues. He described talking about the spousal veto in private with a gay MP:

By the end, none of us really understood it. And I think that if you’re talking to a gay politician about that kind of issue, and they’re not getting it … you would have trouble selling that to the electorate. And I think one of the dangers of an LGBT group, especially a center-right or a conservative [one], would be that you probably don’t want to appear kooky, or worse still, loony.²⁰

Cisgender, gay council members and MPs do not “get” trans issues and cannot “sell” them to the conservative electorate, so they are excluded from the agenda.

After 2013, LGBTory only announced political progress after the fact, when it could be framed as fait accompli rather than ongoing struggle, thus reinforcing their vision of the UK as a post-gay “shining beacon” with no remaining gay political interests. This is especially clear when LGBTory avoid party leadership’s homonational rhetoric. The party frames Muslims and multiculturalism generally as a threat to British culture and values. This framing is apparent in the 2015 Tory manifesto, and in ominous pronouncements such as this one from party leader David Cameron:

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone…. [W]e will govern as one nation, and bring our country together. That means actively promoting certain values… Equal rights regardless of race, gender or sexuality…. it means confronting head-on the poisonous Islamist extremist ideology. Whether they are violent in their means or not (Dominiczak & Prince, 2015; Wintour, 2015).

Tory leadership frequently leverages such homonationalist rhetoric to ally gayness and Britishness against the common enemy “Islamic extremism.” However, like LGBT* in UKIP, LGBTory diligently avoided this rhetoric. The words “Muslim” and “Islam” only appear in three of the 5,634 documents I gathered from LGBTory, each time as a group that deserves respect. According to LGBTory, there is no ongoing threat to or political project for gay people, not even the ones their prime ministers insist upon.

Homonormativity is not necessarily a product of moderate, center-right politics, however. It also appears on the far right, as with Switzerland’s SVP or the White Power group American Resistance Corps. The National Socialist League (NSL) insisted they were devoted in the long run “to removing the issue of sex from politics where it has no business” (Veh, 1974). They often lionize figures like Ernst Rohm (leader of the Nazi SA) and Robert Shelton (Grand Wizard of United Klans of America) in order to argue that gay men can be leaders in Nazi and White Power movements.²¹ Under headlines like “Brother against Brother” and “Divided and Conquered?” they write:

it’s tragic that White men of good will must squabble while our racial enemies advance on all sides… we of the NSL pledge that, when sexual preference becomes a matter of private choice, not public debate, we will merge our ranks with the other militants of the Right. Yey, until that welcome day, we have no choice but to fight separately for the right to serve proudly and openly among the soldiers of civilization (Veh, 1974 emphasis original).

The NSL advocated for homosexual participation in violent, racist white nationalism. Yet they cannot be properly described by “homonationalism.” Their writing explicitly separated their sexuality from their racism. It did not justify racism in the name of protecting gay people or the civilizational virtue of liberal tolerance. They called for homonormative assimilation into an illiberal and intolerant civilization.²²

Discussion

These gay right organizations suggest important correctives to theories of homonationalism, tension, and post-gay/homonormativity. None of these theories accounts for all of the gay right even within a narrow context like the UK from 2013 to 2015. Examining them through cases that are distributed across the two axes of gay political organizing that I highlight with my framework—whether “gay interests” exist and how they are related to “right interests”—allows us to refine them further.

Homonational rhetoric

Although Puar chose not to study the gay right and came out against using homonationalism as a way to draw contrasts between people or political movements (Puar, 2007, 2013), scholars nevertheless have much to gain from investigating when social actors on the right and elsewhere do and do not use homonational rhetoric. For Puar, homonationalism is a field of power we all exist within rather than a political position that distinguishes “‘good’ (progressive/transgressive/politically left) queer from a ‘bad’ (sold out/conservative/politically bankrupt) queer” (2013, p. 25). This theoretical approach has generated valuable insights. Nevertheless, we can learn from asking why, for example, both LGBTory and LGBT* in UKIP avoid using homonational rhetoric. That omission is surprising because they exist within homonationalism’s field of power. The leadership of both parties uses homonational rhetoric extensively, as do other, center and left wing LGBTQ organizations operating in the UK at the same time. Yet homonational rhetoric is incompatible with LGBTory’s post-gay rhetoric—homonationalism is the opposite of politically demobilizing gay identity. And it is at odds with the variety of domestic gay interests that LGBT* in UKIP articulate: homonationalism poses the nation as gay-friendly and threats to gays as external.

By labeling these organizations’ rhetoric—and that of others like the neo-Nazi NSL—as “not homonational,” I do not mean to cleave them apart from groups like the EDL and label them “good queers” who are not complicit with racist and imperial power structures. Instead, I make the sociological point that there is meaningful variation in how gay organizations frame issues, even when they occupy the same fields of power. This is not antithetical to Puar’s theorizing. She acknowledges there are important differences between gay organizations with “anti-migrant sentiment” and “anti-racist queer groups” (Puar, 2013, p. 29). I show there are yet more differences if we dare to look for them. For example, there is a substantial political difference between the rhetoric of many “homos” who are “nationalist” (Halberstam, 2011 uses the label this way), and homonational rhetoric. Nationalist homos cannot account for statements from straight men like David Cameron and Nigel Farage that construct Muslims as enemies of the UK due in part to their supposed intolerance of gay people. Such an approach would also label the National Socialist League as homonational (Buchanan, 2022), even though they never paint the enemies of white nationalism as anti-gay, and they were formed 26 years before homonational politics are generally said to have begun.

My analysis of the gay right also highlights a fissure between homonormativity and homonationalism. To be sure, homonationalism is theorized as “homonormative nationalism,” “building on” Duggan’s critique of homonormativity (Puar, 2007, p. 38). In order to push its message that Muslims are a threat to English culture, for example, the EDL LGBT Division tells stories like the one about a gay school teacher supposedly fired because Muslim parents complained about his sexuality. That a gay man would be allowed to teach, much less protected by law from discrimination, is a sign of British tolerance and homonormative inclusion of gays into mainstream culture and economic relations. A post-gay national reality is assumed, and Muslims are framed as an external threat to it. But the existence of such a threat runs counter to post-gay logics, which are predicated on a lack of unifying or mobilizing gay political issues. The EDL’s homonational rhetoric is highly mobilizing. They call for members to take to the streets, where they often violently brawl with other protesters and police.

Statements like “Idiotic left-wing Queers just don’t get it! It’s Israel they should and must support”²³ make sense in the homonational frame of the EDL, but not in many post-gay and homonormative frames. LGBTory, for instance, is actively against the idea that gays “must” be on any side of any issue. Like most homonormative organizations and intellectuals, they stress that sexual identity should not require taking particular political positions, that gay people can and do have diverse positions. Even neo-Nazis like the NSL argue that gay identity does not imply a specific political position. If we follow numerous theorists of homonormativity and take Sullivan’s statement that “leaving bigots their freedom” and “leaving all the inequalities of emotion and passion to the private sphere” is the objective of homonormativity because doing so “banishes the paradigm of victimology” (Sullivan, 1995, p. 186), then the EDL LGBT Division’s demands for violence against and moral regulation of supposedly homophobic Muslims are decidedly not homonormative, and neither is their unrelenting portrayal of gays as victims of violence and discrimination. So while homonationalism is predicated on some parts of the homonormative imaginary, it is fundamentally at odds with others. This fundamental fissure between homonormative and homonational logics has largely been ignored in favor of elaborating their affinities.

Tension

Despite theoretical critiques of additive intersectionality, the tension it predicts between gay and other identities does describe the experience of some right wing gay organizations. Such organizations have political agendas based on specifically gay interests, as seen when LGBT* in UKIP made policy recommendations for the 2015 UKIP manifesto. But those gay interests are in conflict with the right-wing party, which refuses to advocate for the issues put forward by its gay members. This lack of support, and the ongoing incidences of anti-gay speech by party officials, create enough tension that LGBT organizers and elected officials regularly quit, criticize, and even sue UKIP for discrimination. This mirrors Weeks’ description of living with “a variety of potentially contradictory identities, which battle within for allegiance” (1990, p. 88). But that internal battle is not always resolved by leaving the right: UKIP’s gay organization lives on because most of its members do not resign, and new members get recruited.

While nearly all additive intersectionality accounts assert that members of the gay right have race, gender, and class privilege (Bersani, 1987; Brekhus, 2003; Rogers & Lott, 1997), UKIP is decidedly working class. Its second chair, Flo Lewis, is a cis woman, and their former MEP, Nikki Sinclaire, is a trans woman. So even in this case of additive intersectionality, the formula is not simply one oppressed identity (gay) plus all privileged ones. This may be why tension and resignations are more apparent in UKIP: the balance of identities and interests is more even; conservative ones are not as totalizing.

However, many gay right organizations do not fit into the tension position theorized by additive intersectionality. Within organizations like the EDL, gay interests are not contradictory with the right’s goals. They are not suppressed, downplayed, or traded off with other issues. Instead, gay and right wing interests are reconstituted to be fundamentally aligned through homonationalism. Notably, the LGBT Division frames Muslims as the only gay issue, which prevents the possibility of conflict between the interests of the broader right wing movement and those of its gay subgroup. Even when other issues like employment discrimination are raised, they are always raised in service of the shared goal of demonizing Muslims. Simultaneously in post-gay organizations like LGBTory, there is no conflict between gays and the right because there are no gay-specific interests. As the additive intersectionality approach predicts, the white, cisgender, upper middle class men of LGBTory are able to side with the right because of their multiply privileged positions. But, importantly, unlike working class UKIP members, LGBTory experience such privilege that they no longer experience their gay identities as oppressed or at odds with the right’s agenda. Living “beyond the closet,” they have no internal identity tension to resolve, no choice to make between allegiance to their sexuality or to their race, class, and gender.

Post-gay, homonormativity

As prior work on post-gay politics suggests, a society and its gay movements do not simply become post-gay when rights are achieved. Rather, access to post-gay politics is uneven along lines of other social inequalities such as race, class, and age (Ghaziani, 2011). This unevenness explains how Seidman et al. (1999) and Brekhus (2003) were able to find middle class white men beginning to live “beyond the closet” in the US over 20 years ago, before even the nationwide decriminalization of sodomy. It also aligns with the demographics of LGBTory and similar post-gay organizations, which are comprised almost entirely of white men, many of whom have elite educational backgrounds, high level political access, and relatively high class positions.

But my findings also illuminate that post-gay political organizations do work to construct the illusion that we are already in a post-gay world even as gay political victories continue to advance. LGBTory does this by letting cisgender heterosexuals set the gay agenda. When their party does something “for the gays” like spending money on anti-bullying campaigns, LGBTory celebrates it publicly as fait accompli. After marriage equality, they present gay political issues primarily as things that have already been won, not things in need of activism and political mobilization. Sometimes LGBTory itself experiences gay politics in this way, as when they found out that pardons for prior sexual offenses were included in the 2015 Conservative Party Manifesto only after the manifesto was finalized. LGBTory are not only passive in the construction of a post-gay agenda, however. The cisgender men of LGBTory actively undermined the agenda of their trans officer, both on their public website and in private conversations with Members of Parliament. Even though the “spousal veto” gets at the heart of their last major campaign, marriage equality, they chose not to pursue it because they did not believe straight, cisgender conservatives would understand or care about it. Likewise, they refused to use their party’s homonational rhetoric, which suggested an ongoing threat and political cause for gay people.

Conclusions and future directions

Because the gay right is largely outside the sociological imaginary (Halberstam, 2011; Robinson, 2005; Stone, 2018), the theoretical toolkit we have for understanding it and the overall range of sexuality-based political organizing is fragmented and incomplete. Some of our most widely used theories for explaining the gay right, such as homonationalism or post-gay rhetoric, were developed primarily from empirical work on people who vote for Democrats or Labour, not self-proclaimed right wing or conservative gay organizers (e.g. Bernstein et al., 2018; Ghaziani, 2014; Puar, 2007). My overview and examples of the gay right demonstrate that our question should not be which theory is correct—they are all demonstrably useful in some cases and off the mark in others. The questions are when these conflicting theories can provide insight into actually-existing politics, and how they may fit together. I begin to answer these questions with a two-axis framework that relates both movements and theories based on A) whether they believe such a thing as “gay interests” exists and B) how those gay interests relate to their chosen political position. By recognizing subjects’ place in this two axis framework, future work can contribute to our understanding of the overall range of sexuality-based political organizing.

There is still more work to be done on how people and organizations come to be where they are in my framework. My comparison of LGBTory with other groups suggests that class is an important factor in whether organizations use post-gay rhetoric: the fewer material and social challenges one faces, the easier it is to claim to be beyond material and social challenges. The case of LGBT* in UKIP suggests that class and other factors may play a role in placing organizations in the tension position: people experiencing more axes of disadvantage are perhaps less able to sustain a sense of alignment between their interests and right wing politics. My present investigation cannot tell us how class produces these differences in gay right politics, if it does. More work is needed. Analysis of the NSL and other neo-Nazi groups shows that ideology can matter as well, but in unexpected ways. Being far-right does not necessarily put them in a different rhetorical group from center-right Tories or Republicans. And even though the NSL and EDL both have violent, far-right, white supremacist views, because the NSL’s rhetoric is open about fascism and intolerance, they do not use the homonational rhetoric of the EDL, which relies on a frame of liberalism and tolerance. While I show that the positions in my framework are often mutually exclusive both in terms of their logic and emperically, we still have much to learn about when people and organizations might occupy more than one position simultaneously, or transition from one to another. This is especially true for homonormativity and homonationalism, which developed theoretically in close interaction but seem empirically much more distinct.

More generally, phenomena like the gay right—those that are unexpected (Stone, 2018), under studied (Halberstam, 2011), declared impossible (Bernstein et al., 2018), or even defined out of possibility by the methodological choices of social research (Hadler & Symons, 2018)—can be particularly informative for testing the boundaries of and extending social theory. We would do well as scholars to seek out the “unthinkable.”