The Messy, Sordid Spectacle of Gay Republicans (w/ Daniel Lefferts)

Show Notes

By day Terry Dolan coordinated the fusion of free-market radicalism and evangelical fundamentalism known as the New Right. By night he cruised DC's steamrooms and gay bars. In 1982, his face appeared on the cover of Christopher Street with an article about his radical, norm-breaking politics and his hookup with a federal employee.

DANIEL LEFFERTS(author of the novel Ways & Means) joins David and Blake to talk about the contradictions of right-wing gays past and present. We discuss the pleasures both of being an insider and of hating insiders, and why the right-wing homosexual stirs the gay imagination to fascination, disgust, and sympathy. 

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Chapters

00:00 - Our first threesome

06:27 - The important question: Was Terry Dolan hot?

09:55 - The “Rich and Powerful Queens” of the Reagan right

12:03 - Gay hustlers, strippers, and spies 

16:25 - What type of gay was Terry Dolan?

21:35 - Why it gets harder to be gay in the GOP

27:04 - Who was screwing who in the New Right?

32:25 - Dolan as a pioneer of norm-breaking

40:54 - Why do we want to confront closeted gays?

48:04 - Right-wing gays and the pleasures of power

50:22 - Dolan’s hookup with a federal employee

54:32 - Daniel’s descent into the world of gay MAGA

57:42 - The petty-bourgeois class position of OnlyFans boys

1:03:08 - The good boys who love Red Scare

1:09:20 - Gay attractions to transgression and order

1:13:50 - The weird homoeroticism of MAGA

SOURCES

Perry Deane Young, “God’s Bullies,” Christopher Street, August 1982.

Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 (2021).

Neil J. Young, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (2024).

James Kirchick, “The Secret Life of a Gay Political Strategist in Reagan’s Washington,” Rolling Stone, July 28, 2022.

Shawn McCreesh, “Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government,” New York Times, August 26, 2025.

Shawn McCreesh, “In South Dakota, Neighbors Feel Sorry for Kristi Noem’s Husband,” New York Times, March 31, 2026.

Daniel Lefferts, “My Afternoon With the ‘Normal Gay Guys’ Who Voted for Trump,” GQ, February 10, 2025.

Jack Crosbie, “Hasan Piker: A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body,” New York Times, April 27, 2025.

Creators and Guests

Host

Blake Smith

Blake Smith is a historian, writer, and translator. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, American Affairs, Tablet, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.

Host

David Sessions

David Sessions is a historian and journalist. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Point, Dissent, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others.

What is Off Christopher Street?

Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip through the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

Blake Smith: I think I'd complain to David, I'm continually surprised by like, gay guys I meet who in their public presentation, like have like nice corporate or art world jobs and who find things that I say in print like, bad, but who love Red Scare, who love Perfume Nationalist, who love like things that to me are like, this is like straight up MAGA chud, like Nazi garbage. But if you can enjoy it from a little bit of distance, then it's like, ⁓ you know? And I do think there's a kind of, I mean, to me, Milo is like, that's exactly how all gay guys are in my mind. Like that is what being a gay guy is. It's like, you you get too real at Thanksgiving, you get a little drunk, you you say something, you know, off color. Like when he got canceled the first time for being like, ⁓ yeah, I got felt up by a priest and I loved it. That to me, like, that's very normal.

Daniel Lefferts: That's something like I've had more black men in me than a Kardashian or something.

Blake Smith: Come on, that's like RuPaul season three. That's just a normal way for gay guys to joke. But I think people in a certain lanyard wearing corporate sphere or in academia get cut off from that. And I am surprised continually by meeting sort of good boy, eunuch gays who don't get to joke that way. And yeah, I mean, I would love to make the case that you can be a classic gay guy and not Hitler. That would be my public service announcement.

David Sessions: This is Off Christopher Street, the podcast where we look into the archives of the gay magazine, Christopher Street, as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I'm David Sessions and I am joined as always by my co-host and fellow historian, Blake Smith. And this time the writer Daniel Lefferts joins us to talk about right-wing gays and why they alternately fascinate and horrify us. In particular, we talk about the 1980s conservative activist Terry Dolan, who by day was coordinating the Reagan revolution, working with emergent Christian right leaders like Jerry Falwell, and by night was picking up young men in D.C.'s gay bars. Dolan appeared on the August 1982 cover of Christopher Street, Sleeping with the Moral Majority, along with an article that described the power gays of the Reagan universe and Dolan's hookup with a Library of Congress employee. We talk about the history of gay men who have put their attractions to money and political power ahead of their sexual identity and how we react even now to gay men who compartmentalize or deny their sexuality. We also get a behind the scenes look at Daniel's reporting on the gay MAGA movement and talk about the weird but somehow non-gay homoeroticism that permeates the right under Donald Trump. Before we get started, we wanted to remind you to subscribe to our Substack at christopherstreetmag.substack.com. which is kind of our hub for the show. Blake has been writing some great bonus content on some of the people and themes that we've talked about. And I hope to do that as well as I have more time. If you listen to us on Spotify or Apple podcasts, please give us a rating or a review, which really helps with the metrics, especially helping new listeners find out about us. So with that more than enough intro, we hope you enjoy our conversation about the messy sorted spectacle of right-wing gays. All right, boys, we are back. Blake is here, as always. we are very excited to to induct our first friend of the pod. So for the first time, we will be a threesome. Joining us is the writer, Daniel Lefferts. Daniel, thank you for joining us.

Daniel Lefferts: Thank you. I'm honored to be the first friend of the Pahadu.

David Sessions: Wow. I know. are his, Daniel is a very new friend and we're very excited to have him as our first.

Blake Smith: You meet in a wholesome way. Can I ask like you have met IRL so like.

David Sessions: We have met Irel. I would say it was wholesome.

Daniel Lefferts: we went to Julius, which David had never been to.

Blake Smith: So many firsts, David.

David Sessions: I still have a few firsts in me and they're like tame things like that.

Blake Smith: Okay, like meth, that's, you've already, that's-

David Sessions: Yeah, okay, I know that I'm not gonna have that first. But as we got there, I was like, wait, as I was on the way, was like, wait, I remember going to some gay dive bar in the village like very early in my time out of the closet. And maybe it was this, but once we got there, I was like, no, I don't think so. I would say it was a first.

Blake Smith: Anyway, classy. That's a nice place to meet a Republican gentleman.

David Sessions: Anyway, we should pro before we get too off track, we should we should introduce Daniel properly. He is the author of the novel Ways and Means, which if you want a good novel by a contemporary gay writer, you should check that out. He has written for the Paris Review, the Yale Review, and having recently infiltrated some MAGA gays has some firsthand experience with what we're going to talk about today, which is the Sorted Delicious messy tragic is spectacle of closeted Republican gays from an era that really feels like a totally different universe back when political scandal was still possible.

Blake Smith: Right, many things are similar, but I guess being scandalized is over, because yeah, the Kristi Noem boob job husband, that came and went already.

David Sessions: I mean, this has probably been the case for a while now, but even outings or gay scandals a few years ago, even a little bit pre-Trump, I feel like they were just kind of a joke, no one... It was more people making fun of them than...

Blake Smith: Rachel Maddow is taped for nothing. Even if she had found it, what would it have done?

David Sessions: There's been so much, so much has happened since the piss tape. I've already forgotten about that. So much insane shit has happened. Okay, but what are we gonna talk about? Someone introduce our article for today.

Blake Smith: Okay, well we have from the issue 67, what is this? August 1982, issue of Christopher Street, the cover story, Sleeping with the Moral Majority. This cutie, question mark, depends on your taste, but he looks very Nick Fuentes, like a slightly older Nick Fuentes. He's like skinny, post-twinck. He seems like he's short. He has this kind of short energy and a mustache. I haven't looked up what his height was. That doesn't...

David Sessions: I watched one of his speeches on YouTube just so could see what he was like as a physical presence and I think that's correct. think he looked short. It wasn't well filmed. didn't have much perspective but he did look

Daniel Lefferts: It's like more than a foot shorter than Reagan in that one picture.

Blake Smith: Yeah, okay. That explains already a lot about we haven't yet named him Terry Dolan, a conservative homosexual who was very involved in what the the founding of CPAC.

David Sessions: It's was called, it's NC pack or Nick pack back then. I am not sure if that is like the, that's one of the things I failed to look up is if that is like a direct ancestor of. Nick pack.

Blake Smith: That sounds terrible. You see why that didn't last. Somehow CPAC, that has a crispness, it's good branding. But he's a big, big conservative activist starting in the mid to late 70s, running through the 80s until his death of AIDS in 1987, 86?

David Sessions: Yeah, around 87 I think.

Blake Smith: And this article in Christopher Street that, among other things, outs him is a chapter from this Perry Dean Young book, God's Bullies. And Young is this big gay journalist who had written a book on Leonard Matlovich, who we talked about in a previous episode, this gay Air Force guy who outed himself and then got kicked out of the military. And then Young seems

David Sessions: He was also the co-author of the David Cope biography, kind like the ghost. His name was on it, but he was kind of like the actual writer behind it. So that's where he got famous. But he also covered the Vietnam War. He worked as a regular journalist before. And this book is, it's like a broader investigative book about the New Right in general. And then this excerpt in Christopher Street is the gay chapter from it in which he outed Terry Dolan. And apparently it was... passed around the Reagan administration. And there's, it actually came up online when I was looking for stuff. There's this, there are these files in the Reagan presidential library where it's just someone's file called this box called homosexuals. And it's all this like intelligence mostly on gay groups. So it's like clippings from gay newspapers and from the advocate and stuff like that. And then this chapter is just in the middle of it. But so I thought that was funny.

Blake Smith: I mean they knew what they were doing that this feels very like excerpted as the cover story for an issue of Christopher Street Feels very like taking the Gaetan Dugas story out of Randy Schilt's and the band played on which is like a very small amount of the actual book but that is for sure the most salacious exciting people couldn't click yet, but if they could click it would have been clickbait

David Sessions: You will have to explain what that is.

Blake Smith: to girls, girls, girls can look up Gaitan Duga, they don't have to be explained everything.

David Sessions: All right. Yeah, it was also apparently not only excerpted in Christopher Street, it was an advocate and a couple of other places as well. But there was a very vibrant gay press at the time, unlike today.

Blake Smith: So we've established, I what this article is doing is outing the sky, but you know, what appeals to us in this? What's exciting about it? You David, like feel like it's a story about how different things are today because we already know like for instance, Nick Fuentes is into Catboys and it doesn't trouble anyone. It doesn't slow down the machine at all. So you feel like this is, what's interesting is the difference between now and then rather than the persistent homo conservative closeted fascist thing.

David Sessions: Yeah, I think I would say that. But that's like jumping to conclusion. I want to talk about the fun stuff in the article. So maybe Daniel, what did you think about, tell us a little bit about what happens at the beginning.

Daniel Lefferts: Now I feel like I'm on like a, I'm getting quizzed. So it, you know, it's definitely sort of presented salaciously. We have this like figure who's like well known in DC to like habituate gay parties.

David Sessions: who is some kind of not named but some kind of long time Reagan advisor.

Daniel Lefferts: Right. You know, I think like what's what was sort of interesting to me was just that on the one hand, he was like so able to keep his identity a secret, but he was at the same time, like pretty careless. Like he was was suddenly like out and about at gay parties. He was making himself known, but this seemed to not really be known or acknowledged by, you know, a lot of like whatever, like Falwell and people in the Reagan administration. it's, it was, it's kind of impressive to me how he was able to lead this double life for a while, but I don't know. I also feel like there's maybe an extent to which people did know and sort of.

David Sessions: Yeah, well, I thought that was weird too, because so it starts out with this like describing these parties of these gays in the Reagan administration, the RPQs, which I think means rich and powerful queens in another I can't find where it was now. But in some of in some other book I read, they called themselves the Laissez Ferries, which I thought was hilarious.

Blake Smith: Right here they're just the 13 richest fairies.

speaker-3: Well, so let's

David Sessions: laissez-faire is apparently meant, it meant like extreme laissez-faire economists. It was used on them and then also the gays use it about themselves. But they're throwing these lavish parties. It opens with this kind of anecdote of the Reagan gays having some party and somebody invites a go-go boy for $200 and the joke is like how little $200 means to any of them and the guy is like, we did this just to show you that you can still get something good for $200. But yeah, is this, even in that opening set piece, is this kind of, you know, this is not, it's not hush hush at all. It's quite out in the open. A lot of these people are married, have children. Maybe some of them didn't, but several of them that do, that are mentioned, you know, have lovers. And so that is, it suggests that like people, you know, people did know, and it must have been something about the culture of Washington where there was that.

Blake Smith: Right, so Dolan notably, like, you know, they profile a couple of other recently scandalously outed older conservative politicians who had the wife and kids and all of that. And Dolan does not, even though he's like early 30s, you know, when this breaks, which is, you know, maybe already a bit suspicious in his circles. I say the $200, that would be $1,000 in today's money. So I don't know what the rates for a stripper who dances like competently or I don't know what pays.

David Sessions: Good for you for looking that up. Actually, I don't know if it would be a lot more than that now.

Daniel Lefferts: I feel like a thousand is, that would be my guess.

Blake Smith: Right, hooker rates actually have not really gone up. When I look at the late 70s, early 80s, it's like a couple hundred dollars a night for someone moderately nice, which times 4.5 is what it is now. See, one, trickle down works, and two, inflation, not that bad.

David Sessions: Well, we also learned that the hustlers that some of these people frequented, that they were $50 and there was this famous gay hustling outfit in the early 80s that got accused of being a nest of Soviet spying. I don't think it actually was, but...

Blake Smith: frequent. That's why you pay a little bit more, you know, if you bargain you'll end up with a spot.

David Sessions: Whoever made up the story was clever because they could have very easily had the boys be in

Blake Smith: I'm sure that will be a series on Netflix soon. It's very it's very heated rivalry coded

Daniel Lefferts: It's very, ⁓ the Americans.

Blake Smith: Yeah, it's the Americans. It's that what's the one like that starts in the 50s and the bottom dies of AIDS and there's the toe sucking. I didn't watch but

Daniel Lefferts: I know exactly what you're talking about. Fellow travelers.

Blake Smith: It combines, you know, it's everything. American Civil Travelers, United Rivalry.

Daniel Lefferts: I would actually fix the Americans for me because the most boring part of that show is like the heterosexual thing. ⁓ Like I just don't, I don't care about like the husband wife children thing, but if it was just gay, was just too like sort of like bitchy gay guys living in suburban DC.

Blake Smith: So we're here on the sexual. That would fix most shows. Get

David Sessions: Or if they were like going after gays that would be more exciting. I actually just watched the first episode of the Americans recently because I haven't seen it obviously in a decade and it has some like honey pot stuff in the pilot and I was just like I don't care.

Daniel Lefferts: I care when Matthew Reese is the honeypot.

Blake Smith: Who is

speaker-3: He is the...

David Sessions: He's the main guy.

Blake Smith: i- you know, dad, i don't wanna explain who is gaitan zugar, but i have to someone tell me who is matthew wreath, so

David Sessions: He is handsome, but he's often ugly in his disguises.

Blake Smith: Yeah, of course. shouldn't wear a handsome disguise. That people will be drawn to that. You should disguise yourself as a somewhat unattractive person. Speaking of which, we should post a photo of Terry Dolan for readers to decide for themselves if he's cute or Because I feel like a lot hinges on, is he attractive? Like, how sympathetic are we to him? How much goodwill do we want to extend to this guy? I feel like this is an issue with Nick Fuentes also. It's like, does one find him attractive? What are y'all's thoughts?

speaker-3: Thanks

David Sessions: Well, that's one reason I wanted to find a video of him or see more than just a photo so I could see, you know, hear his voice.

Blake Smith: Is he masked? He seems squeaky.

David Sessions: He's a little bit squeaky, of, maybe kind of like Nick Fuentes. It's not Ben Shapiro mouse voice, but it's a...

Daniel Lefferts: He was doing the sort, like, think he was doing the, like, flannel and Levi's look. Like, he was...

Blake Smith: Yeah, he's he's arrived at one point in the young at a bar in a kind of clone adjacent look so he can like slip out of the brooks brothers into I guess this and so you know flannel top

Daniel Lefferts: Yeah, so it wasn't like quite leather, it definitely wasn't sort of like femme. It was probably that year's version of like a twang. Like a sort of like young cowboy.

Blake Smith: They don't have yet access to that vocabulary of the trunk. That's interesting. mean one thing that we didn't talk about in the gay masculinity episode is like the Right that you know step down from leather in terms of butchness is like the like the flannel flannel and Levi's Anyone come like I wear flannel and jeans right like that's not fooling anyone But it's somehow like a post a skinny post tweet can put that on and it somehow is signaling gayness But it's not like a dress

David Sessions: Yeah, I also I felt like we should do a disclaimer about that episode and because we should have better distinguished like leather from clones and clones are part of the broader discussion of gay masculinity But they're not the same thing as as leather bars and on that note It's it's interesting that a lot of people holler and white a lot of people talk about clone style being democratic because like anybody can go buy the stuff at the whatever thrift store they all go to and

Blake Smith: whereas leather is expensive.

David Sessions: But yeah, so I would say, think Dolan is still, he's still, it's only, it's 82, so there's still clones around. Like I think he's probably basically that.

Blake Smith: He's a word free.

Daniel Lefferts: I do think I have to say, I think a lot ends on the height.

Blake Smith: ⁓ you are a-

David Sessions: Elaborate, elaborate.

Daniel Lefferts: Well, because the picture I'm forming is sort of a wood picture, it involves him being an angry shortish.

Blake Smith: ⁓ yeah, yeah, I think that-

Daniel Lefferts: If he was like six foot and he had this sort of like manic angry personality, I'm not

Blake Smith: I've never met someone that tall who was like that.

Daniel Lefferts: Yeah, you're not allowed to have a personality disorder if you're over five or less.

Blake Smith: You know I don't have much of a personality. I mean, I love short guys because they're gonna perform. They're gonna put on a show. Give away all my tips.

Daniel Lefferts: I'm getting this one short came from him.

David Sessions: Now I have this Nick Fuentes comparison in my head. I'm trying to decide if he's like Nick Fuentes

Blake Smith: I squeaky short manic, you know.

David Sessions: Yeah, he kind of has that Nick Fuentes type voice that is not really effeminate, but it's kind of nerdy. That's what I would say.

Daniel Lefferts: feel like his face probably crumpled a lot when he was being, when he was when he was like sort of thesiferating, you know, like.

Blake Smith: feel like he's short but has poor posture. Is that accurate from video, David?

David Sessions: The video quality is not great, so it's kind of hard to tell. He's very energetic. It opens with an extended, I thought this was interesting, extended kind of jokey attack on the Washington Post, which felt very Trumpish to me. It's like it was about... For those of you who don't know it, they have just changed their format and they have a different layout and different style. It is now not only the most dishonest, it is now the ugliest newspaper in world. But since I don't talk to them, I only give issued statements to my staff and say this is the answer to their question. And invariably it's the same answer, which is I don't talk to the most dishonest newspaper in America, but if I did, I would say this.

Blake Smith: I mean, of course, yes, I feel

David Sessions: ...failing New York Times and the lying media and the fake news.

Blake Smith: We haven't explained very much, mean, ⁓ Dolan, born 1950, so he's like 32 at the time of the article, he talks about himself as a born-again Catholic who was radicalized, now this I have never heard before. I have never heard someone say this. He was radicalized by Richard Nixon because Nixon was so liberal. He was a big government guy. I'm sure there must have been people, like he can't have been the only one, but that's a new story for me. So he gets involved in working for the John Birch Society. he's part of, and I guess both Daniel and David Schaul have a better grasp on this than me, but in this kind of mid to late 70s fusion of the emerging Christian right and the like old school hard right, which was like not necessarily all about religion, but it was like, you know, small government, anti-communism. ⁓ which could see Nixon like trying to clean up the air or something as totalitarian.

David Sessions: Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, this this story kind of sits at the intersection of of those two because you kind of can kind of see in these this is a this crystallization of the new right in the Reagan campaign. I'm going to go on about this because I'm reading Rick Perlstein right now. It's kind of what happens with the new right is these outside groups sort of hide their they think the party is too moderate. It doesn't have any identity. It has no challenge to the New Deal. And so they kind of hijack it from the outside. And this guy, Richard Vigory, who's mentioned in the story was really good at using these direct mail techniques to create constituencies of single issue voters about whatever he wanted to. And some of them were fake and conspiracy based. And then they brought all these energies into a conservative takeover. But those groups don't all agree. And you can kind of see that here. There's these more libertarianish ones, which Dolan seems to be, even though he identifies as Catholic, and there's these scenes of him talking about the Bible. He seems to be more of the libertarian type and he's kind of has this uneasy, this transactional but uneasy relationship with Falwell and the religious right. But yeah, like even the Briggs Amendment, which was a homophobic legislation at the time in the early 80s. can't remember. Don't make me.

Blake Smith: Can you explain-

Daniel Lefferts: I

David Sessions: I learned so many

Daniel Lefferts: I'll just sort of pipe up here and say that this period is also like a really interesting moment in the history of the gay conservative because it's like the moment when the right fully marries itself to evangelicals and it becomes harder for gay Republicans to justify their presence in the party.

Blake Smith: like the meaning of evangelical is changing because like during the Carter administration, you can have weirdly gay groups and certain kinds of evangelicals in the White House, maybe not on the same day, but there's like a certain kind of like center left Christian piety that Carter can be performing, which isn't necessarily incompatible with like the Equal Rights Amendment, certain kinds of feminism, like a certain openness to gay rights. And then all of that is like, scrambled by 1980. That evangelical is right wing, that the Republican Party is about them, but also that they can be in alliance with the laissez-faire capitalist and with the John Burchers. That's not at all obvious. And we'll talk in a future episode about how scary and crazy that seems to a lot of people at Christopher Street like Chuck Ortega. But it makes sense that people, maybe one, don't believe that it's as bad as it is at first and also then freak out about it. in ways that are in retrospect counterproductive.

David Sessions: Yeah, so I looked it up, since we have the internet right here. The Briggs Initiative was this, was also called Proposition Six in California. It was kind of like an Anita Bryant-ish, like banning gay school teachers thing. And the reason I mentioned it is because both Reagan and William F. Buckley came out against it for four, like, libertarian reasons. And Reagan said this thing that I thought was a little surprising and kind of, he's like, what if some kid is just... mad at their teacher and wants to get revenge and decides to say they're gay. And he's like, this would just destroy people's lives for no real reason.

Blake Smith: Innocent heterosexuals are hurt by homophobia every day.

Daniel Lefferts: That is such great who I mean, I'm struggling to imagine a kid pretending to be gay to get

David Sessions: ⁓ No, no, no, accusing the teacher of this convalescence.

Daniel Lefferts: I misunderstood. Okay. I was going to say, yeah, that's a really strange thing of him to say, but it's still strange.

David Sessions: But point being that even just a couple years before this, people who were the leaders of the Fusionist right were still kind of taking these libertarian positions that were definitely not fall well. And so there is, Terry Dolan is definitely hypocritical, but there is at least some plausibility or superficial idea here that they could be working for gays or for gay rights within the Republican Party, which is... historically was not that crazy because, as we know from the Neil Young book, coming out Republican, was, gays were initially attracted to the Republican Party because it was a party of anti-government and they saw government as the main threat to them.

Blake Smith: Well, and I don't know how much to push the analogy between now and then, but thinking about among the general population of people who voted for Trump most recently, and the couple of friends that I have who did, their disagreement among themselves about whether Project 2025 was real, about whether Trump is going to be super-scientist, about whether Trump is going to be very Christian. I can just imagine that in 1980, people had a similar kind of confusion about ⁓ has Reagan brought in the religious right to bamboozle them? They're useful idiots for his economic, laissez-faire, small government agenda. Who's screwing who in the alliance? This could be something that people might have real confusion about.

David Sessions: And from the religious rights perspective, from the perspective of people I grew up with, from my family, the religious right is who was getting screwed. I mean, my parents liked Reagan, but they were not fans of Bush or Bob Dole. you know, they were, I went, definitely attended a Pat Buchanan rally as ⁓ a child. So, yeah, I mean, their perspective was like, they still always nominate rhinos. They always go. run a moderate Republican and no one's ever actually a conservative and they never actually do anything about abortion rights and

Blake Smith: So, okay, having said that Dolan is a key figure in the putting together of this alliance, like in the mid to late 70s, by the early 80s, we haven't mentioned his brother, which like David, you have all sorts of facts about, but he has an intimate connection to the White House.

David Sessions: I feel like I've been talking a lot, Daniel. Do ⁓ you want to say who his brother is? Yeah.

Blake Smith: Daniel, do you have the fa-

Daniel Lefferts: brother's Tony Dolan, is that right? And he is a speechwriter in the White House. And I don't know if we want to get to the, he plays a big part in the end of this story. So like an element of this that maybe not super relevant, it's, know, like Perry Dolan was a master of was using PACs to support campaigns ⁓ beyond contribution limits. Like he was sort of a genius.

David Sessions: Which were new at the time and he was kind of a pioneer of that.

Daniel Lefferts: And, you know, like obviously the sort of the central thing with PACs is as long as they don't communicate with the campaign, then they're fine. But he meanwhile has a brother in the White House and his sister also I think worked in the White House. So he has like these like intimate family connections to the sort of administration that his PACs are supporting. And so his brother's a speechwriter and after Harry's death, his brother tries to redeem his memory in a really kind sad and insane way with this paid essay. I don't know if you want to take it from there.

David Sessions: Maybe we can talk about that when we ⁓ get to it ⁓ in order. yeah, so Dolan is kind of this, or Tony Dolan is kind of this, I guess the young kind of uses him as part of his proof that basically that Terry Dolan is pushing the legal limits of how PACs operate. As a brother in the White House, he's ⁓ meeting with, there's no way that they're not talking to each other. And so that's how he appears.

Blake Smith: So she is an innovator. She is at the technological frontier. She's at the legal frontier. Like the mailing list, which we take for granted, that really has to be put to... Do you have fresh in your mind, either of you, the facts about the mailing list as a technology? Because it's politically really important for conservatives in the 70s, putting together these lists of hundreds of thousands of people who can be appealed to about abortion, about taxes. but also for gays. Like that's how all of these early gay publications, bookstores, lifestyle products, like depend on selling each other list of homosexuals who can be advertised to. So like, I don't know if someone has done a monograph yet on like the mailing list in the seventies and eighties, but it's actually really important for constituting like political constituencies and these kinds of pseudo-ethnic communities. And then yeah, Dolan is playing at this and he's playing with the packs, now are like very, very important to our politics, but which at the time were like new and it's unclear what you can get away with and, you know, gay is love pushing boundaries. A reverse bribe is so smart because you don't have to spend any money.

Daniel Lefferts: Exactly. And also I think the thing with the reverse bribe, the politician's name escapes me, but he brought it to some judicial body to complain. And with a reverse bribe, like no money has changed hands, so like no bribe actually took place.

Blake Smith: This is like the big brain version of like your sibling not hitting you, you know? Like, ⁓ I'm not hitting you, I'm not hitting you, my hand is just floating above your face.

Daniel Lefferts: He was like a, he was a political, ⁓ machinator, you know, like he, knew what, which boundaries to get very, very close to and what he could get away.

David Sessions: And the story sort of portrays, uses a contrast between him as this kind of very brash, you know, he goes on TV all the time and he says these brash things. He'll even call out Reagan to his face and, you know, say he's not conservative enough. And Tony Dolan, by contrast, is a behind-the-scenes figure. He's a speechwriter. He thinks speech writers should be seen and not heard. He's a sort of, I saw he has lots of bylines in the National Review and, you know... decade or more before this and apparently also the story tells us forces any girl he dates to subscribe to national review. It's extremely sexy, extremely sexy.

Blake Smith: Alright, great. You know, the film content remains great. Love their movie reviews.

Daniel Lefferts: At least he thinks women should read. That's an improvement on some corners.

Blake Smith: Let's just have it in the house in case a man comes over.

Daniel Lefferts: We have to give him credit words.

Blake Smith: But this is also, it's ⁓ it's very Nick Fuente, it's very Tucker Carlson, where like, you know, I am critical of the president, right? Because he's not killing enough people of color or killing them all along or whatever. But yeah, like the combination of being a consummate insider, like, you know, knowing what kind of media manipulation to do, what kind of legal manipulation, but in addition to having like great private connections, also having this public persona of. independence, outspokenness, that's a great combination.

David Sessions: Yeah, and he's a quintessential one of the, you know, historian framings of understanding the New Right is that they were a radical revolutionary movement as opposed to a conservative one. And Dolan really embodies this. Like, he's very much a norm breaker. Like, you know, very proudly and openly, like, I don't care what the norms are. I don't care. you know, I'm not going to be nice to you. I'm not here to make friends, you know. And that was what. a lot of these groups were like. Someone brought up women and I wanted to, what did you guys think of this part where

Blake Smith: Is there a woman in this article?

David Sessions: Well, this quote where he says, where Dolan says, he talks about the Republican women being ugly. You ever been to a Republican meeting? Ugliest women in America. No, no, that's not true. The second ugliest women in America after the Democratic convention.

Blake Smith: this somehow an answer to the question of whether or not he's gay? he brings this up because... ⁓

David Sessions: Yeah, this is when, so we should say the author of the book that this is excerpted from knows that Dolan is, everybody, like all journalists seem to know that Dolan is gay. Young knows that, knows people who have, you know, has gay friends who have slept with him. He's been, I don't know if he says that he personally saw him, but Dolan is seen around. Like everybody knows he goes to the Eagle, he goes to like steam rooms at the gym. And so he's... It's an open secret. And then the pivotal scene that broke news and made this the most important chapter of the book is that he goes to interview Dolan and eventually confronts him. They talk through a bunch of issues and positions, but also eventually confronts him with the question of whether he's gay or not. But yeah, this is the part where they're kind of, he's kind of running through Dolan's positions on stuff. he's talking about, so he's also around this time just weirdly. I think the rest of the New Right thinks it's kind of weird. Paul Weirichu, who is, you know, super homophobic, is not a fan of him giving interviews to the, constantly giving interviews to the Advocate and the Village Voice. So he's, he's going in these gay, you know, giving interviews to these gay newspapers and saying like, ⁓ yeah, like, like, I'm sorry for that nasty fundraising letter that we sent out. Yes, I believe that gay should have like discrimination protection. And then all the Washington Post and all the newspapers like, you new right guy comes out for a. And then he's and then he has to be go back to his groups and be like, like, I didn't say that. And I apologize to Jerry Falwell for it. So it's this constant dance back and forth between, you know, what he actually thinks.

Blake Smith: Maybe because moral gaze will not be affected.

Daniel Lefferts: I actually found that part of the piece quite poignant because it really creates a portrait of someone who's kind of backed himself into a corner and is just sort of panicking and kind of losing the thread of what he believes or is supposed to believe. I just feel like this is kind of the moment when his contradictions start to become untenable.

Blake Smith: So, okay, I don't know if David, you decided this is too early yet for this or not, but what I find really fascinating is not so much like this person himself, Dolan, but Young and we haven't mentioned, like, Young tracks down this guy who has had sex with Dolan, ⁓ Richard Anderson, who was a information specialist at the Library of Congress copyright office and was alive at least in the late 90s. did some Googling, so doesn't seem to have died of AIDS. So, good on you, Richard Anderson. But both Young and Anderson, and it sounds like Daniel, have a certain, like, there's a certain poignancy, like, in like, ⁓ no, ⁓ no, you're trapped in your contradictions.

Daniel Lefferts: I mean, it's not sympathy necessarily, but...

Blake Smith: Right, no, it's not like being in favor of or identification with, but there is like young very much stages in this chapter. Like he doesn't initially want to confront Dolan, he's dragged into it, he does feel like, ⁓ this is someone who's like really caught up in these contradictions, has painted himself into a corner. And yeah, I mean, I'm interested in that, right? Because one could say like, ⁓ this guy is just an insane creep, or like they're all like that. but some other is there's something that gets us going further.

David Sessions: Yeah, well, I was going to ask Daniel when you were talking about this, you know, this moment where his, just seems to be kind of all over the place. And I think you say rightly his contradictions start to show. Obviously that has to do when he's responding to the questions about whether he's gay and like the gossip that Young brings up. But do you think some of that, what do you think about that? Is like some of that ideological as well that he is like, you know, this high profile figure who's trying to hold together a coalition. And maybe I think I came away maybe after a couple of reads, feeling like he actually was a libertarian and more of a social libertarian and wanted to. He apparently helped kind of behind the scenes, helped ⁓ Bob Bowman, who is this other Republican congressman who was arrested for soliciting a gay hustler and was outed. ⁓ He helped him found a gay Republican group. So it does seem like he kind of wanted to go that direction, but he was just also having to have lunch with Jerry Falwell every week.

Daniel Lefferts: I mean, it seems possible to me that like a contradiction as big as, you know, he has the contradiction of being a homosexual, ⁓ homophobic party, but I think another contradiction he's facing is that between a sincere libertarianism and all the compromises he's having to make as his party becomes more more wedded to an evangelical right that has very sort of, in some ways, like very sort of big government instincts. And I'm not sort of like falling in love with him and

speaker-4: Well, it's in the article, but I.

Daniel Lefferts: But I think what's poignant to me is that he does not seem in control of the story anymore.

Blake Smith: That's how bottoms manipulate you, one, is they seem out of control. That's how they get control.

Daniel Lefferts: He's definitely giving sort of his short mentally unstable... ⁓

Blake Smith: know what I'm doing, I'm just a little guy.

Daniel Lefferts: But I thought it was a well rendered moment in the essays.

David Sessions: Yeah, there's this part, there's also this part which had, which I thought was one of the funniest like lines of the, in the story where he's describing his kind of back and forth with the other gay journalists and this very much captures him losing the story. And then he did one more curious thing. He granted another interview to Bush, to Larry Bush, who was a gay journalist on the subject of homosexuality, this time for an article in the Village Voice of April 20th, 1982. This article, without answering the question, was all about whether Terry Dolan is gay is or is not gay. The main source was, incredibly, Terry Dolan himself.

Blake Smith: I mean there's contradictions but there's also there's a kind of self-destructiveness or there's an enjoyment. We've already mentioned like an enjoyment of pushing boundaries but it's I mean I didn't follow George Santos closely enough but Santos seemed to love flying too close to the Sun. I mean he was asking to be burned.

Daniel Lefferts: think there's also a little bit of like a Steve Bannon flood the zone. Here like, you know, if you put out enough like contradictory signals, just no story materializes and that seems to be kind of like maybe just instinctively.

Blake Smith: ⁓ yeah. leaking weird nudes. One weird nude is a scandal. A thousand weird nudes.

speaker-3: Have you?

David Sessions: Yeah, it seemed to have worked like he doesn't actually seem to have like he what eventually brought him down was you know being sick from AIDS not you know he wasn't that he was ⁓ it's true Paul Weirich does you know he's like everybody's talking about this and this is not cool you know you need to cut it out but you know other Republicans are quoted being like as long as he's doing his ideological mission we don't care.

Blake Smith: Right, in some ways it's like we get disappointed when we try to out one of them and then they don't care, right? Like we expect them to be consistently homophobic and, you know, to punish the people we out, but that does not work necessarily.

David Sessions: Which Young has this kind of, I thought this part was a bit melodramatic where he's going in to interview Dolan and he's like, am I gonna confront him or not? And I'm just thinking about this Nazi guy who like told the New York Times he was gay and then shot himself and what if he kills himself? And you know, that kind of keeps coming back. Also to side note, like the gays just cannot stop talking about Nazis and like comparing themselves to like. nazis in concentration camps in this kind of era.

Daniel Lefferts: Did that Nazi, I think he was worried that people would reveal that he was Jewish.

David Sessions: ⁓ I'm sorry. Yeah, I knew I was going to miss mess something up there because I could shoot

Blake Smith: Which becomes the basis for this early Ryan Gosling movie, the title of which I'm forgetting, but Ryan Gosling is a Jewish Nazi.

Daniel Lefferts: perfectly cast in that role.

Blake Smith: was born to play. don't remember it being a good film, but he was already handsome.

David Sessions: So just to sort of finish out the scene of the confrontation in Dolan's office, he denies that he's gay, obviously, but he's very interested in who said that he was. And he wants Young to tell him, who are these people and what are they saying? What parties did they say I went to? And then there's, and they kind of walk out. And so this, and this is what he says kind of wrapping up. says, that afternoon I worried this is referring back to his fear about the Jewish Nazi. That afternoon, I worried that the confrontation might have caused him to do himself in in the men's room and never go back to his double life. It also crossed my mind that he might send somebody out to take care of me. Also super melodramatic. But no, I thought he is not a man to face up to anything. Like Bauman, he had obviously not thought about what he would do if his homosexuality was disclosed because he has lived in two worlds as separate as darkness and light. And when he was in one, the other didn't exist.

Blake Smith: I mean, I love that. That's a serve. Am I gonna get killed for publishing this? This is how brave I am.

Daniel Lefferts: When I read that part about how he was afraid he'd go into the bathroom and kill himself, I assumed he was thinking of the film Advise and Consent. One of the characters in that film is a closeted gay politician who eventually kills himself in a bathroom in a government building. I was like...

David Sessions: Explain why

Blake Smith: Are they in Dolan's home? Are they in a restaurant? like... Cause like, to kill yourself in like a restaurant bathroom...

David Sessions: I think they're in his office for when they're doing the interview.

Daniel Lefferts: He describes his office as not having like any

Blake Smith: Okay, okay, yeah. mean killing yourself in your office is very traumatic. I love that.

David Sessions: I feel like I should take the opportunity to say that I never get movie references, but I'm going to blame my evangelical childhood, you know, I had access to culture.

Blake Smith: WIP YOUR HEAD BITCH YOU TOO NURA

Daniel Lefferts: I have to recommend advice and consent if only because it

David Sessions: ⁓ I do know what that is.

Daniel Lefferts: That's happily a great gay storyline.

David Sessions: Yeah, so that was that is actually earlier in the Jamie Kerchick book. We should we should mention that, like I'm taking a lot of context here from ⁓ from James Kerchick's book, Secret City, which is a very long history of gay Washington. And it's also like a quite beautifully written book. ⁓ Highly recommended if you're interested in the Cold War, the Lavender Scare, you know, gay political scandals. And there is a there's a part about advice and consent. The the novel itself and then the movie and its impact on gay Washington. So I do know what that is.

Blake Smith: Kritchick is great because he can be like a screaming Larry Kramer type polemicist, but absolutely turns that off in the book. I don't, I don't know how.

David Sessions: Speaking of YouTube videos, I also found a video of Larry Kramer talking about Terry Dolan and it's from some unnamed, you know, it's super sketchy, some unnamed documentary. I could not find the source of it, but it's a short clip and he's like, he's like, I saw Terry Dolan at a party and you know what I did? I threw a drink in his face.

speaker-4: this is a man who's raising money to kill us, Terry Dolan. And I went to a cocktail party in Washington and there he was and I threw a drink in his face. I how dare you come to a party of gay people after what you're doing to us.

Blake Smith: Okay, well, with a grain of salt, let's take that one.

David Sessions: Although it is mentioned in this story that there is a scene that features Larry Kramer kind of shouting him down at a party and saying, like, why shouldn't we out you, basically? So yeah, Blake, you wanted to talk about one of the things that interests you is what we've been talking about the last few minutes, the way that the journalist frame builds this up in his mind. He kind of has this melodramatic idea of this intervention that he's going to do. And I think from In a journalistic sense, I think he saw it as he had to get this on the record, he had to confront Dolan with this information, and sort of was aware that it would break news, and also aware that outing people was kind of, you know, was iffy in terms of ethics. Like that wasn't, that debate among gay activists didn't really come along for a few more years. So I think it was all that, but he definitely does kind of a, this melodramatic scene in his head and the way he describes it, and would be interesting to talk about, the way that we think about people in the closet or like outing them or what it's supposed to accomplish, are we sorry for them or do we sort of hate them and...

Blake Smith: So yeah, mean, on the one hand, there's the kind of like ethics and politics of outing where Young is thinking about like, does this even work as a tactic? Is this going to do anything? Which is interesting because like it is way ahead of like Michelangelo's senior relay in the late eighties and early nineties, or what's his face at Gawker like in the 2010s outing people right and left. Already Young is thinking like, is this even going to work? are actually conservative voters or elites consistently homophobic enough or not hypocritically homophobic enough for this to even do something like tactically. But there's also a kind of like personal or psychological dimension where he's like, if I confront this compartmentalized self-hating, whatever divided kind of person with the different pieces of his life and say, look, how does it fit together? There's this scene in Faggots where like the father is like trying to get he wants to produce like a gay film like fathers and sons and brothers and lovers or whatever and he's asking some Hollywood producer for the money to do this who he knows is gay and in the closet and the producer is like well I don't think there's really an audience for this I don't know Hollywood's not ready and he's like but you you are a faggot and I think there's there's the wish that when we say that just like ⁓ but but but aren't you aren't you a homosexual that like the pieces will come together They'll be like, ⁓ no, I've been living in the wrong way. I have to change my life.

David Sessions: or they've just been waiting for someone to ask.

Blake Smith: Yeah, yeah, like they haven't put it together, you they haven't done the two plus two equals faggot yet, but we can get them there and this will be great. We'll save them or destroy them. I don't know. There's kind of an ambivalent charge to it. But yeah, Dolan is not having that.

Daniel Lefferts: I think there's a way in which Dolan is perfectly comfortable with his version of homosexuality. The portrait that comes across is of a man who understands himself.

Blake Smith: So you think she is not a house divided.

Daniel Lefferts: Well, I think he lives with like incredible contradictions and like he's pan... I think like he... There's probably like a mounting panic involved as like more and more people try to out him and more and more rumors circulate around him. But I sort of feel like he... He gets to be gay and then he gets this life and this political party that he enjoys. And I think it's like a trade-off that he... accepts but doesn't really understand the untenability of.

Blake Smith: So there's this thing at the beginning actually where Young speculates on the pleasure that such a person might have, where like the pleasure of getting away with it, the pleasure of being smarter than other gays who have to be publicly out, who have to the party line. And it made me wonder if Tony Kushner hadn't read this when he's writing that great monologue for Roy Cohn and Angels in America, which is how like, you are a homosexual, you're a loser, no one takes your phone calls. I can talk to the president anytime I want. Whether or not that's real in this person, I have no idea what Dolan is like, but there is something in the vein of making up a type of guy to be mad at, there's something delicious to be mad at the kind of guy who is getting away with that. That has a real appeal in the homosexual imagination.

David Sessions: Yeah, yeah, was, I'm glad you brought that up because I was just about to suggest we read this part from the beginning because ⁓ I think it kind of connects to something that's in Daniel's GQ piece. He has a paragraph that's kind of doing similar work, I think. So he says this toward the beginning of the piece before he's even introduced Dolan and he's talking about the power gaze of the Reagan Revolution. Like the women Jews or blacks who succeeded in spite of societal attitudes about their kind. These men have a stake in preserving their own oppression. They don't see it as oppression at all. They see it as privilege conferred on them because they are special. If other homosexuals suffer from oppression, then they deserve it because they are so weak or just not clever enough.

Daniel Lefferts: Yeah, bitchy bitchy.

Blake Smith: Do you want to talk about the GQ piece?

David Sessions: I want to move I want to talk about that Do we want to do we want to talk about the ending or the the hookup with Rob Anderson at all? ⁓ Is we have anything else to say?

Blake Smith: love, so both in the show notes and in this, you have confused him with Rob Anderson of the gay science videos from years back. don't know what she's doing now. I think Richard, real name, weirdly enough. So Richard Anderson is like, don't say what government department I work for, but use my real name.

speaker-3: What is

Daniel Lefferts: That whole story of him not really being sure that it was Terry Dolan is just, I mean, this is just a small note, but it's like, it just shows how blurry television was back then. It's hard to believe. And then I was like, ⁓ right. Like there really could be some ambiguity. Like, is this the person I've seen on TV?

speaker-3: Hahaha!

Blake Smith: You know, high definition has been hard for DL guys where that's your next article. You should, you know, the unsung stories of guys who got, I mean, the cheating CEO on the Jumbotron, that couldn't have happened in 1980. The technology wasn't there.

Daniel Lefferts: There's a lot of modern day Blanche Dubois type gays who want to bring back.

Blake Smith: Bring back VHS, bring back indirect lighting. Also Blanche Dubois was 36. So that's something I think about every day.

Daniel Lefferts: How long ago was that, Ryan? I feel like life expectancy, especially in the South was.

Blake Smith: Life is longer and lighting is harsher. So the news keeps getting worse. But wait, do we want to talk about Richard Anderson?

speaker-3: Yo.

David Sessions: ⁓ Okay, Richard Anderson. They meet at the Eagle, I think. You know, they meet at the Eagle. They're like instantly attracted to each other. They're both dressed kind of the same way. If I remember correctly, kind of in this clone outfit. And they go back to an apartment that Terry Dolan recently moved into. They have sex. And he sees, he kind of is thinking all along like, ⁓ I think I've seen this guy on TV before. And then he sees the Nick Pack stationary on the table. This reminds me of when I ⁓ went to the house of a gay person that I sort of, acquaintance and had no idea what his job was and he had APAC business cards. But, so he's still, still even when he sees that he's like, he doesn't put it together. He's like, ⁓ I hope that's not who you work for. And Dolan's like, yeah, it is. And he's like, I don't really care. I'm not political. And then he asks his last name and Dolan tells him, which I think that's a revealing moment too. It's like,

Blake Smith: And you assembled that bag.

David Sessions: He's not being careful at all. He's got his job laying around in the open. He says his last name. He's not actually being super deal. ⁓

Daniel Lefferts: the subject of gay conservatives and the men who sleep with them, have to say Richard's sort of about face is just a really, it's like it's just a gem of an example of I think how a lot of people deal with conservative gays that they're attracted to. It's like, I hope that's not who you work for. Oh, it is. I don't care. I'm not political.

Blake Smith: I mean, that's a great switch. It feels like it could be, this is some like white lotus kind of dialogue. I don't know whether that makes it feel like more realistic or more like made up by young. But I mean, certainly like all women I know are like, my husband is not Republican. No, no. So like they've been doing that for thousands of years. Why shouldn't gays?

David Sessions: Okay, well, let's since we since we read that part of the essay where he's talking about how the Reagan gays see that you know, they don't really see that themselves as oppressed at all They're like invested in you what what other other gays or left-wing gays would call their oppression But they see it as privilege and they are it's a form of superiority the fact that they are they are passing for straight they are not being they're amassing power and they're this close to to the president and They're you getting away with it They see that as a sign of distinction and privilege. let's, Dana, when was the story that you, it came out well before the New York Times, a gay story about the actual gay men in the Trump administration. You visited a log cabin Republicans party for GQ. And when was this?

Daniel Lefferts: So I think that party was actually, it was a Christmas party. And then I published it, so in late 2024, and then I published it in think February, like after inauguration.

David Sessions: Right. okay, this is like a post-election thing. And actually, before we talk about the themes, I was just curious, like, what you thought as an observer, you know, I want the behind the scenes. The New York Times reporter, Sean McCreech, just did a behind the scenes interview of his reporting about, he's the one who wrote the A-Gay story, and he also wrote a story about Kristi Noem, everyone in her hometown.

Daniel Lefferts: Yeah.

Blake Smith: Sexual like what's his deal?

David Sessions: He is, he is. So he was on the ground already in Kristi Noem's hometown reporting on her husband, unrelated to the scandal, the day it broke. And so he turned it into a story about everyone in her hometown's reactions to it, you know, how they all kind of felt sorry for him, which is another difference from, or I guess some of the voters of these, some of the constituents of these gay congressmen, you know, were a bit sympathetic and like even... re-elected them. So maybe the voters have never been as bad as the party operatives. But anyway, so I want to do the, I want to do that kind of behind the scenes interview with you. So you've been to, you live in New York, you've been to gay parties that you you've seen the spectrum of rich gays in New York. How did this one feel? Like, was it, did it seem like mostly the same type of people? Was there like a vibe in the air that was different? How did you feel about it?

Daniel Lefferts: ⁓ So it was at a very fancy penthouse on the Upper West Side that was sort of donated for the evening to the log cabin Republicans of New York City by I think a straight couple, friends of the gays. Allies. so it was sort of an upscale generally vibe. The look was business casual, preppy. I would say the age range was like 60s to... late 20s and Andrea, I always mispronounce this last name, Andrea Katsimatidis. Was there Rob Smith is a really prominent gay MAGA influencer. He was there. ⁓

David Sessions: to see this. This OnlyFans boy, Michael Dougherty.

Daniel Lefferts: ⁓ no, he wasn't there. Who is the. ⁓

David Sessions: Right, I was going to ask you if he was actually there, but you did interview him.

Daniel Lefferts: Was the advocate editor who turned into ⁓ like a big MAGA Chadwick? Anyway, former advocate Chadwick Moore was there. it was like a sort of, it was, was a hoity toity crowd. And in addition to that party, I interviewed some sort of influencers, I guess you'd say, who just were kind of megaphones of the gay MAGA coalition leading up to the 2024 election. So that was this guy named Tyler Fahs, who's

David Sessions: Have it more.

Daniel Lefferts: On Twitter, he's tough talk Ty, and then this guy named Sean Fahey, and Michael Doherty who ⁓ is, he's probably the least political of all, but he's definitely like not really doing political content anymore, but he's sort of like an OnlyFans.

David Sessions: And not the only one, there's a couple of, there's a couple of MAGA OnlyFans boys.

Blake Smith: I guess, you to be fair, OnlyFans was owned by that like insane Zionist child pornographer, so that sort of fits perfectly.

Daniel Lefferts: Yeah, you know you could actually write a whole separate article about all the gay pornstars that are MAKO. There's a few.

David Sessions: To me that is not surprising because like what are the type of people that do that and like the places they live, they're in Florida, they're in Arizona, wherever, they're products of their environment so that doesn't surprise me at all.

Daniel Lefferts: Also, if they're successful, they're wealthy or self-employed people.

David Sessions: Yes.

Blake Smith: They're like boat owner coded, know, they're entrepreneurs.

David Sessions: They're petty bourgeois, yep.

Daniel Lefferts: They're getting pummeled on attack season. It makes sense.

Blake Smith: I don't know if this is actually the default, I've been looking like, ⁓ I love LPSG and tracking what happens to former OnlyFans performers. think a lot of them become realtors. And that's like a Florida realtor, of course, you're a Mago.

David Sessions: Right. Right, 100%.

Daniel Lefferts: I ⁓ did a good enough behind the scenes of my piece.

David Sessions: But I guess I was wondering like how it compared just in it's a somewhat formal event So it's not like a gay, you know a circuit gay pregame or something like that But I was just wondering if it felt like the same people look the same as that or like it compared

Daniel Lefferts: You know, something I, the party was like noticeably devoid of eroticism. And I think there's like a couple.

David Sessions: I'm not even doing as well as the 1980s guys.

Daniel Lefferts: I mean, part of it was that you were in a straight couple's house and they were there and then like Andrea Katzematidis was there. Like it was like the adult, like there were like adults in the room, so to speak. It was also daytime. Wait. I think it started around two and went till six. it was like, okay. The core of it was like early evening.

David Sessions: Yeah, right.

Blake Smith: What hour was this?

Daniel Lefferts: Charles Moran was there who was at the time the lock-up and national president. He now has some other sort of sinecure in the administration. So it did not, I left before it ended, but I am confident it did not descend into an orgy or ascend into an orgy. ⁓

Blake Smith: So my god, you know, I guess I had in my mind both conflated this with your thing about your year of dating finance bros and then conflated both of these with young young has a kind of like himself and via Anderson an erotic investment I think of some kind in his subject so I thought Daniel Lefferts also is you know, somebody like horny for MAGA guys, but ⁓ Which is you know, no judgment, but right this sounds like a very unlobidinal experience

Daniel Lefferts: ⁓

David Sessions: Well, I do want to ask you about your investment in these because you say even in the piece that like you're fascinated by these guys, you had kind of like started following Milo Yiannopoulos when he was doing his dangerous faggot tour. So I wanted you to talk about that, like what how that came about or, you know, what what place that comes from or how you how you feel about that consuming that content.

Daniel Lefferts: I mean, it's hard to talk about this without sort of stepping in it because, you know.

David Sessions: Stepping it. That's, you know, that's what this is for.

Daniel Lefferts: I did become interested in Myolynoclus and I think something that was really interesting to me about him was that he felt like a gay from the past in a lot of ways. There was something Oscar Wildean about him, was something Christopher Hitchensy about him. He was extremely provocative. He had an acid tongue. I felt at that time that I couldn't remember the last time that I'd been around a gay guy with like a really acid tongue, like with a really sharp wit and with a sort of sparkling menace. And I think those qualities all describe the 2015 era Mylianopolis. I think he's changed.

David Sessions: Yeah, what was his what was I remember seeing photos of him? What was his gender presentation like that? We are this is on my mind because we were talking about Yeah

Daniel Lefferts: At that time? I think he, are we talking like, sort of like, was he a man?

David Sessions: Well, like, how did he dress or did he... was his...

Blake Smith: he have a dye job? Was he blonde?

David Sessions: I'm just wondering if he like played up his like effeminacy or faggotry as part of like a defiant, you know stance or

Daniel Lefferts: There was definitely like a queeniness. I mean, I seem to remember pictures of him wearing like pearl necklaces, I think, and like maybe like coats with like some fur.

Blake Smith: Which now every straight frat guy does so good on you Milo for bringing that back it has replaced the hookah necklace

Daniel Lefferts: 25 year olds working at Deloitte are wearing pearl necklaces.

Blake Smith: living in Milo's shadow.

Daniel Lefferts: dates with their girlfriends. so, so yeah, so and so I guess like I, you know, I found him very entertaining. And I guess a question for me at that time was like, was there something about far right politics that had like activated this way of being gay that seemed to be waning and I again, like I'm stepping in because like, you know, I'm making really broad generalizations, but it was

David Sessions: I don't think that's off track though because there has been, I don't think it's like a big phenomenon or anything, but there has certainly been people who are trying to make that happen. Make a kind of, even if it's not explicitly MAGA or right wing, a kind of like dime square, like decadence, like that kind of stuff that it's sort of ambivalent or even hostile to gay identity and it's, you know, hearkening back to some kind of previous, perhaps closeted, but more effeminate. decadent, wildian style.

Daniel Lefferts: I don't think gay men really ever became any stars of the Dimes Square scene, but gay men loved Dasha Nekrasova ⁓ I something similar was going on there.

Blake Smith: Well, I think I'll complain to David, I'm continually surprised by like, gay guys I meet who in their public presentation, like have like nice corporate or art world jobs and who find things that I say in print like bad, but who love Red Scare, who love Perfume Nationalist, who love like things that to me are like, this is like straight up MAGA chud, like Nazi garbage. But if you can enjoy it from a little bit of distance, then it's like, ⁓ you know. And I do think there's a kind of, I mean to me, Milo is like, that's exactly how all gay guys are in my mind. Like that is what being a gay guy is, is like, you know, get too real at Thanksgiving, you get a little drunk, you you say something, you know, off color. Like when he got canceled the first time for being like, ⁓ yeah, I got felt up by a priest and I loved it. That to me, like that's very normal.

Daniel Lefferts: I've had more black men in me than

Blake Smith: Yeah, that's like, come on, that's like RuPaul season three. That's just a normal way for gay guys to joke. But I think people in a certain lanyard wearing corporate sphere or in academia get cut off from that. And I am surprised, like, continually by meeting sort of good boy, eunuch gays who don't get to joke that way. And yeah, I mean, I would love to make the case that you can be a classic gay guy and not Hitler. That would be my public service announcement.

Daniel Lefferts: And you know, and like just on on that point, I will say one of my sources for that article was a publicist who decided to remain anonymous. Like, you know, I'm not going to say his name, but but he, you know, he said there was something I I didn't quote everything he said, but I think he's kind of said this on other outlets. think he said something like MAGA is today's MTV. There's and there's

Blake Smith: ⁓ yeah, they love to do a conservatives are the new punk rock like

Daniel Lefferts: I think, and I honestly, feel like that felt true as recently as early 2025. And so I think, I think his point was that that appealed more to gay men than sort of like middle-class Taylor Swift Democratic Party.

David Sessions: Mm-hmm, right. Yeah, and maybe that connects to the Red Scare stuff too, because I would even go so far as to say, not just good boys, but even very woke, know, gay left people, so you're much more so than I am, like, listen to Red Scare and post it on their close friends, and I'm like, you, really?

Blake Smith: mean, was one of the most humiliating moments in my life was like a few, you know, some years ago, like I think in this thing I wrote about Bronze Age pervert for tabloid, which of course is completely evil. But it was discussed like at some length or the injury long shoe thing was discussed at some length on Red Scare. And all of these gay guys that I knew who I thought better of were texting me to say like, ⁓ you know, the hurt dude, like they're talking about you on Red Scare. And girl, this is terrible that you listen to this. what? Like I feel like, yeah, like. Gayness should mean that you have some access to transgression and to a certain ability to be flip. And it's weird how so many gay guys outsource that to the worst people imaginable.

Daniel Lefferts: Yeah, and like, you know, it's, I, this was a piece of journalism and like what we read for today's episode where, know, it's just straightforward journalism history. So it's hard to get into this, but like, I, you know, cause if you ask these men like, why, you know, cause these are like, the men I was talking to are not just sort of red scare listeners. Like they're like going to like, you know, CPAC and stuff like that. they're.

David Sessions: Yeah, they're actual Republicans.

Daniel Lefferts: And if you ask them, like, you know, what brought you to conservative politics, like they have their answers and, you know, today a lot ⁓ of Republican gay men are really put off by, you know, the trans portion of the queer community. But they also, they love low taxes, they like guns, like they have all these talking points, but I just kind of always have this like suspicion that there is something perverse in their attraction to it and it's I think it's hard for them to articulate and it's hard to Project that onto them if they're not gonna sort of supply it. It's like something that can be explored maybe in like

Blake Smith: I mean the perversity, you know, we need to find more wholesome outlets for homosexual perversity. That's what we need.

speaker-3: That's cool, anyway.

David Sessions: Well, I was going to say in relation to Red Scare, it's this kind of, at least a couple of these people maybe that you interviewed are going purely on vibes and it's like, ⁓ this is the cool thing. This is the counter normative or transgressive thing to be doing right now. And the Democrats are lame and we have bad vibes. And so they're enjoying this stuff or aligning themselves with it without any real political. understanding but you make a very good point that like Terry Dolan was a real, a true conservative ideolog and so are some of these people. ⁓

Daniel Lefferts: think Republican politics offers actually two things that are historically attractive to gay men, which are transgression, but also a sort of ⁓ stick-and-span, anal, retentive sense of like, pomp and circumstance. It's the party of transgression for them, and then it's also the party of handsomeness and stutes and orderly.

David Sessions: Yeah, well, I think maybe even Peter Thiel is an example of this. As in college, he's one of these new right college activists. He's like the Dinesh D'Souza of Stanford. Like he founds this super controversial, confrontational conservative newspaper, which rich donors were funding all over the country. publish terrible stuff about everybody, including homophobic stuff about gays. But it's almost like a the new right offers like a kind of transgression or being bad on behalf of order and normativity or something like that.

Blake Smith: To be fair, the left in the last several years has also offered this combination in the most appealing version, you can be in defense of riots, raise the crime rate, burn down the Wendy's, whatever, and I will get you fired for your microaggression at work. And that is, think, a very American appeal. You want to be a free rebel, but also, what if I could crush my enemies?

Daniel Lefferts: Well, it's actually like in a way it's a reverse and I actually think the like, like, and I think like the the not gay way to combine those traits because what they're offering is a sort of aesthetic. I don't know, that, like there's sort of like, there's sort of a less defined aesthetic there, but there's like a moral orderliness where it's like, I think like a lot of gay men want like transgression and like a sort of like coherent, rigid aesthetic.

Blake Smith: ⁓ yeah, although we didn't circle back to like, Republican women ugly? And maybe this can be toward the conclusion, but it made me wonder like, Republicans somehow have gotten their finger on aesthetics or the idea of like, the New York Times ran this very like crazy thing a few months ago, like the MAGA body and like, can Hassan Piker be the left's alternative? like, Republicans are ugly. Like my family is in Memphis, I have to go back regularly. MAGA voters look disgusting, even Clivicular knows it, but they have somehow generated a narrative about this. But it made me wonder, if Dolan in 1982 is saying Republican women are ugly, I guess the plastic surgery look, like the Mar-a-Lago face, is not yet on them. And then what can the Dems do to get the aesthetics? What's the...

Daniel Lefferts: Yeah, mean, like, it's a very strange story that's taken hold because it just is not where with reality as we all experience it.

Blake Smith: With the gays that you met at this party, you said it was unerotic also, were they ugly? What was the face card?

Daniel Lefferts: Let me put it this way. If I were there for different reasons, I would have left sooner.

Blake Smith: Okay, okay. So yeah, my misreading of you is having a neurotically charged fascination with the darkness of the Maga heart. This is not... ⁓

Daniel Lefferts: Well, as you know, the erotic charge does not necessarily need reality, too.

speaker-3: Yes! ⁓

Blake Smith: It's also like, if porn is based on reality, plumbers are not hot, construction worker is not that hot.

Daniel Lefferts: And yet, you know, but it lives on even when reality disappoints. But yeah, I mean, it's... And I think reading this piece in Christopher's Street just kind of made me realize that like... Or just made me think about how there's this weird fixation right now on the gayness of MAGA that has nothing to do with homosexuality, really. Like the actual gay men in MAGA are like Scott Besson, who's... Very hard to get interested in as a person.

Blake Smith: He doesn't light people up at all,

David Sessions: Alright, couldn't, I could not, I thought like maybe I should have a joke about Scott Besant, but I could, you can't

speaker-3: Yeah ⁓

Daniel Lefferts: He's like, he's very paper pushery, you know, and, ⁓ but like people sort of are really invested in this idea that there's like something like homoerotic about like, you know, Pete, Hegseth, like, you know, like.

Blake Smith: Nothing gayer than beating your wife.

Daniel Lefferts: And so it's like, feel like today we're still searching paranoically for the gays in the Republican Party, but because the gays themselves are uninteresting, we're searching for a gayness. But it does seem to be this recurring feature of how people engage with...

David Sessions: And it does, I mean it really does, I think someone sort of says this in the article, but really the gayest thing about MAGA is Trump, and he's not gay.

Daniel Lefferts: Right.

Blake Smith: think there's something beautiful that people still think of gayness in association with this kind of ⁓ discursive freedom and the ability both to tell it like it is and to make shit up. you know, gays are pretty alienated from these two capacities, but, you know, I keep wishing for like Buttigieg to tap into the fabulating queen.

Daniel Lefferts: Well, and like on the Democratic side, think Gavin Newsom is so much gayer than Pete Buttigieg.

Blake Smith: ⁓ yeah, well in the way that, you know, I've heard it said that only two straight men could write beyond the valley of the dolls, because in the same way that the straight guys in the locker room could touch each other's butts in a way that we would have been afraid to.

speaker-3: Sad.

Daniel Lefferts: And there's sort of like in like in democratic like comms there's like a big sort of effort to like capture like the gay Twitter audience so you have all these like political accounts talking in gay slang like I think today like ⁓

David Sessions: I saw something about that a couple of weeks, in the past couple of weeks. Like, did they have like a gay 20 year old writing her tweets?

speaker-4: What?

Daniel Lefferts: Today the Twitter account for New York State. ⁓

David Sessions: Yes, I saw this right before we started.

Blake Smith: I'm not on Twitter, I did not see this, so someone please-

David Sessions: Go ahead.

Daniel Lefferts: So the Twitter account for New York state, it was tweeted something about potholes and I think the tweet was its whole filling season. So it's just like, guess the point I'm working my way toward is that like gayness has like permeated our political culture, but like the gays themselves are not really there to like hold it up. Like we have like Scott Besson bootages.

Blake Smith: Right, they don't need us anymore.

David Sessions: Right. Or even the clavicular stuff, there's been a bunch of talk about that, like he's bringing this thing, this body modification, this looks obsession and all these things that Fire Island gays have been doing for decades and making it into this cultural thing.

Blake Smith: Once grinders get AI finishes scraping all conversations and straight people really won't need us anymore, they can get rid of

David Sessions: Well, we, and I guess we will have achieved the great dream of the gay liberation people to just, all, to generalized homosexual, a generalized, you know, bias, queerness or, or all the, or whatever.

Blake Smith: Merge with It's very Donna here.

Daniel Lefferts: And just like one more thing I'll say about that is, you know, like on the right, you know, you have, there's that whole very bizarre strain of rhetoric from the likes of like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes that like having sex with women is gay. And then you have someone like Bronze Age Pervert who's...

Blake Smith: Who just is a homosexual, so that's less.

Daniel Lefferts: He's made much more forward about like worshipping the male physique in his online presence and he just wrote this very bonkers essay and some some sub stack only publication about how to like reverse the fertility crisis. need to have a culture that like valorizes male sexuality and

Blake Smith: Gay sex will fix the fertility crisis. ⁓ That's a galaxy brain one. I love him. He's another person where being ugly or being kind of ugly is really important to explaining how it all fits together.

Daniel Lefferts: Right. so it's just like you just think about someone like Terry Dolan being teleported to today. His party is is absolutely steeped in homoeroticism, but it's not gay.

David Sessions: I feel like he would have thrived in the environment though because he's like a precursor of it.

Blake Smith: Yeah, he couldn't if only she had been in the prep era or went out for a role.

David Sessions: Well guys, we have gone an hour and a half, should we ⁓

Blake Smith: I am clearly out of brain cells. But Daniel, do you have a plug for, you have another book in the works, you have a product to...

Daniel Lefferts: I don't have anything to plug. mean, I'm coiling away at a second book, but it's not, it's not exactly. Yeah. I'm still alive and working. That's my plug.

Blake Smith: Stay tuned You have your personal brand to plug.

Daniel Lefferts: Yes, yes, we have I've done I've said nothing to damage it. ⁓ well that

David Sessions: great. You can be a podcast guest in the meantime. It's good that you have free time to be a podcast guest in the meantime. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. This was super fun. Thank you for having me. And we will see you all next time.

speaker-3: Bye.