In case there’s anyone out there who feels this election hasn’t been filled with enough mind-boggling, paradoxical rhetoric, consider this image from the 2016 campaign trail: Last week, Donald Trump walked onstage at his Colorado rally with rainbow flag reading, “LGBTs for Trump.” It’s difficult not to see the irony in this gesture—Trump opposes marriage equality and his running mate voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act during his time in the House. But it turns out there is indeed a sliver of truth to “LGBTs For Trump”—if you take out the L, the B, and the T.
BuzzFeed News reports that gay white men seem to make up the overwhelming majority of Trump’s LGBTQ support, which is consistent with the racial makeup of the rest of his supporters and the turnout at July’s “Twinks for Trump” art gallery at the Republican National Convention.
Part One: Twinks For Trump #RNC #RNCinCLE #RNC2016 pic.twitter.com/bXcucNI1Lu
— Gianna Toboni (@GiannaToboni) July 20, 2016
Some notable men who fit the gay, white Trump-voting demo are Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, and Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor for Breitbart News who was banned from Twitter earlier this year for a wave of racist tweets targeting SNL’s Leslie Jones.
Even though Trump has confirmed any direct outreach to gay voters, Republican activist Chris Barron, head of Facebook group LGBT for Trump, insisted to BuzzFeed News that Trump’s LGBT supporters are “incredibly diverse” and encompass a variety of intersectionalities. “There are a bunch of grassroots activists—they are all over the place,” he said. “I certainly know lesbians for Trump. I know more than one, but I don’t know the exact number.”
However, according to Pew Research, the total percentage of LGBTQ individuals supporting Trump hovers at around 10 percent, while Clinton’s is expected to garner about 70 percent of the total LGBTQ vote, and Johnson and Stein come in at seven and eight percent, respectively.
