A German Philosopher Explains Why Homophobes Act Like That

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His shirt says Republicans, racist, but secretly gay. Democrats, gay, but secretly racist. And though I believe this meme is a little clever, a little funny, even one would say theoretically brilliant, I believe it deserves more unpacking. So I’m going to dissect this using three different academics, and then I’m going to do what the meme won’t do, which is go get the receipts, because a good joke and a good argument ain’t the same thing, and the folks in the back deserve to know the difference.

Let me say what the meme gets right before I say what it hides, because two things can be true. It is right that both parties run on a secret. It is right that the public performance and the private structure don’t match. It is right that the accusation each side throws at the other lands close enough to home that everybody laughs a little too hard. What it gets wrong is the arithmetic. The meme only counts to two. It knows racist and it knows gay and it treats them like two bags you can be caught holding, and the whole punchline depends on you never asking the obvious question, which is, what about the person who is Black and gay at the same time, in the same body, standing in the same voting booth. That person is not in the meme. That person is the reason the meme is funny and the reason the meme is a lie.

Crenshaw Says the Meme Only Counts to Two

Start with Kimberlé Crenshaw. Her framework of intersectionality says that race, class, gender, and sexuality are interlocking systems, not interchangeable ones, and when Crenshaw wrote that up in 1989 she wasn’t theorizing in the clouds, she was reading a case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, where five Black women sued GM and the court told them they could sue as Black people or they could sue as women but there was no such thing as a Black woman under the statute. The law only counted to two. Crenshaw’s whole intervention was to show what falls through the floor when you build a category system that can only hold one identity at a time.

Apply Crenshaw here. The meme is DeGraffenreid with a punchline. Republicans get one secret, Democrats get the other, and the two secrets are arranged so that they cancel each other out, racist over here, gay over there, and there is no cell in the grid for a Black lesbian in Houston or a Black gay man in Memphis or a Black trans woman anywhere. In “Mapping the Margins” in 1991 Crenshaw broke intersectionality into three kinds, structural, political, and representational, and the meme lives in that third one. Representational intersectionality is about how the images we make of people erase the folks who sit at the crossing. That is exactly what the shirt does. It makes a picture of American politics where race and sexuality are enemy flags, and it cannot see the people who are both flags at once, because seeing them would break the joke.

This is where some people might start to experience a little bit of discomfort, because the white gay progressives who love to ignore trans and BIPOC voices, but then hop into their neoliberal Democratic bags and start using racial rhetoric while pushing policies that devastate Black communities, are not going to like where this goes. You know damn well them data centers and how you cozy up to them tech companies is not finna get no good policies for us. In Memphis, a Democratic mayor and a Democratic majority sat still while xAI stacked dozens of gas turbines next to Boxtown and Whitehaven, historically Black neighborhoods that already carry the asthma, and the NAACP had to be the one to threaten suit. That’s what treating our identities like symbolic capital looks like in a zoning meeting. If you’re asking what I mean by that, I’m talking about tokens that you trade virtually, not no live simultaneous realities of actual people. Bourdieu called it symbolic capital, the prestige you can spend without it costing you anything, and Nancy Leong put a finer point on it in the Harvard Law Review in 2013 when she showed how institutions treat nonwhite identity as a commodity they can hold, display, and cash in on. Apply Leong to the Democratic half of the meme and you get the whole neoliberal playbook. The Black face on the flyer is the token. The tax abatement for the data center is the transaction. Same party, same week.

Historical Context: The Closet Has a Government Address

Now, before I get into who this funny looking white man is, let me lay the history down, because the meme is not new. It is the shorthand version of two real American stories that the meme has flattened into a shirt.

Story one is the Republican half. Racist, but secretly gay. That half has a name and a face and the face is Roy Cohn. Cohn was chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953, and while the public remembers the Red Scare, the same machine ran what the historian David K. Johnson called the Lavender Scare. On April 27, 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which made “sexual perversion” grounds for termination from federal employment, and Johnson’s research estimates thousands of federal workers, somewhere in the range of five thousand and likely more once you count the military, were pushed out over the next two decades for being gay or being suspected of it. Cohn drove that machine. Cohn also died of complications from AIDS in August 1986 while publicly insisting he had liver cancer. That is reaction formation with a Senate office. Then, crazy how, Cohn’s most famous client after McCarthy was a young developer named Donald Trump, whom Cohn represented in 1973 when the Justice Department sued Trump Management for refusing to rent to Black tenants. The man who taught Trump how to fight was a closeted gay man who built his career hunting closeted gay men and then defended racial discrimination in federal court. The Republican half of the meme is not a theory. It is a biography.

Story two is the Democratic half. Gay, but secretly racist. That half has a date, and the date is November 4, 2008. California voted on Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage, and the same night Barack Obama won the presidency the CNN exit poll reported that seventy percent of Black voters had voted yes on 8. Within days, white gay activists were on the internet and in the streets blaming Black people for the loss. Jasmyne Cannick, a Black lesbian organizer in Los Angeles, wrote in the LA Times that week about being called the n word at a No on 8 rally. Then in January 2009 the political scientists Patrick Egan and Kenneth Sherrill went back through the data for the Task Force and found the real number was closer to fifty eight percent, and that once you controlled for religiosity and age, Black voters looked like everybody else who went to church every week. The seventy was a bad sample from a handful of precincts. The blame was already out the door. A month after the election The Advocate put “Gay Is the New Black?” on its cover, which is a hell of a thing to print while your own movement is cussing out the actual Black people. That’s the Democratic half of the meme in one news cycle. Gay, loudly, on the marquee. Racist, quietly, in the comment section.

Then it kept going. In June 2015 an internal report on the Human Rights Campaign, the biggest LGBTQ lobbying organization in the country, leaked to the press, and its own staff described the place as a white gay men’s club where women, trans people, and people of color were sidelined. And this is the part where I want you to pay attention to how the law moved. The single biggest federal gay rights win of the Obama years, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was signed on October 28, 2009. It did not pass as a civil rights bill. It passed as a rider on the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual military spending bill. Chandan Reddy wrote a whol…