Gay Republicans’ Message to Religious Americans

On the matter of immorality, gay Republicans believed they could change public ideas, in part, by their own example. Clean-cut, gender-conforming, and well-dressed, Log Cabin’s leaders’ visible presence served to challenge anti-gay activists’ portrait of homosexuals as swishy and promiscuous. Organizational documents encouraged Log Cabin’s representatives to speak openly about their religious faith, as Tafel had always done, and to characterize their political activism as a moral project. By using the same language that so many Americans spoke – and the discourse they believed the religious right had coopted and corrupted – gay Republicans hoped to negate lingering notions of homosexuals as different and threatening.