Anderson Cooper chimed in Thursday on Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s recent claim that former President Donald Trump is likely to win the “normal gay guy vote.”
During a panel discussion on his show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” the CNN anchor said he was curious to know exactly where Vance would make a distinction between “normal” and “not normal” gay men.
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Vance’s comment overlooked the staunchly anti-LGBTQ platform that Trump embraced during his first term ― something which many supporters of Vice President Kamala Harrisquickly pointed out on social media.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote because again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone,” he said, before suggesting implausibly that more high school graduates were identifying as transgender to boost their odds of getting into Ivy League colleges.
As Vance pointed out, many just want to “be left the hell alone.”
Musk was initially required to appear in court in Pennsylvania on Thursday but didn’t show up. If radical LGBTQ activists put queer stigma at the center of transformative organizations like ACT-UP, liberals and conservatives argued that sex radicalism was the problem to begin with.
As conservative Catholic journalist Andrew Sullivan argued in this publication in 1989, gay marriage was the answer. Foglietta’s ruling not only overrules that requirement, but it allows the tech mogul’s America PAC to continue its giveaway to registered voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a pledge supporting First and Second Amendment constitutional rights.
On his X platform Thursday, the tech mogul celebrated the ruling in a post reading “American Justice FTW,” as the ruling also pushes the lawsuit’s proceedings until after Election Day.
Krasner was seeking to halt Musk’s scheme, calling it an “illegal lottery scheme to influence voters.”
In the lawsuit, Krasner argues that under Pennsylvania law, only the state can run a lottery for the benefit of the state’s seniors. The lawsuit questions whether the million-dollar winners are actually random, considering that two of them had attended Trump rallies.
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As municipalities began to concede civil rights protections demanded by LGBTQ activists, the backlash was predictable: Heterosexual conservatives mobilized to take back normality. In 1978, Proposition 6, which would have made it illegal for any gay or lesbian person to teach in public schools, told “homosexuals” that California would not “accept you are normal people, because you are not normal people.”
Gay rights leaders convinced Californians to reject the Briggs Initiative, but less than five years later, the HIV/AIDS crisis ripped through gay male communities, reviving long-held prejudices about homosexuals as degenerate, undisciplined, and diseased.
“It’s fine for Donald Trump, but on a gay guy, that wouldn’t be considered normal.”
Vance made the questionable claim in a Thursday interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast in which he alluded to a gay friend who was a committed conservative. “Because, again, they just want to be left the hell alone, and now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it.”
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Vance’s comments align with a growing sentiment among conservatives that the LGBTQ+ movement is being overshadowed by radical ideas, especially around youth gender transition.
If George H.W. Bush could still maintain in his losing 1992 campaign that homosexuality “in my view is not normal,” popular culture had begun to disagree. Homosexuality was “normal”: a natural, involuntary condition that required access to mainstream institutions, discipline, and responsibility—not special rights.
Like military service, legal marriage was not a new concept for many gays and lesbians who had been married or lived in long-term domestic partnerships.
The two delved into various hot-button issues, including child gender transitions—a topic that has sparked significant national debate.
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According to Vance, many gay men are not on board with the progressive agenda pushing for medical interventions like puberty blockers and surgeries for children.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote,” Vance told Rogan directly.
Krasner also alleges that neither Musk nor the PAC has published clear rules for the giveaway or explained how they are protecting entrants’ personal information. Following suit, European countries like the United Kingdom recently banned puberty blockers for children, indicating a collective reevaluation of “gender-affirming care.”
Meanwhile, the U.S.
Supreme Court is set to review a case on Tennessee’s restrictive law on child gender procedures, a decision likely to shape the direction of future legislation.
Several detransitioners, including Chloe Cole—who began transitioning as a teen but later reversed course—have filed lawsuits against medical providers involved in such procedures.
In August, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons took a public stand against sex-change surgeries for minors. He contrasted this man with other members of the “crazy” broader LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender and nonbinary people. “Once legislation is turned around to support and to flaunt the abnormal,” Christian singer Anita Bryant told reporters on the eve of a successful 1977 referendum to retract gay civil rights in Miami, “rather than to protect the normal, then our nation is gone.” John Briggs, a Republican state senator from Orange County, California, agreed.
“At first I was like, ‘Oh, JD Vance thinks there’s normal gay people.’ So I guess that’s sort of progress,” Cooper, who is gay, said. By the 1990s, it seemed possible.