GLR May-June 2024

BTW Wait, There’s More! We ended the last issue’s BTW with a squib about a breaking story involving the head of Moms for Liberty, Bridget Ziegler, and her husband Christian, the former chair of the Florida Republican Party. It would be hard to over state Moms for Liberty’s role, and that of Bridget Z., in the na tional effort to ban books in school libraries. Christian stands accused of rape by a woman who was apparently involved in three-way sex scenes with the Ziegler couple. Now that the deets are coming out, the whole thing is so much more sordid than we dared to imagine. Investigators have found emails showing that the Zieglers were actively looking for female partners with whom to have three-way sex—and it appears Bridget was the ringleader. Finding the rape-accusing gal a lit tle too needy, Bridget despaired that they would need to “hunt for someone new.” Christian, for his part, was keeping a list of potential third parties, classified under the heading “Fuck”—a variant on Mitt Romney’s famous “binder full of women”? In any case, it’s just the kind of language that you’d expect from the people who want to prevent our children from ever en countering an LGBT character in a library book. Download This The cavalcade of prominent anti-LGBT cler gymen and politicians with a secret gay history seems endless; and yet, like unhappy families, each is special in his own way. The case of Michael Voris offers the added bonus that he was an early leader of the “ex-gay” movement who founded and, until recently, headed up the Catholic media company Church Mili tant. Needless to say, the spectacle of “ex-gay” leaders and huck sters getting busted in gay flagrante is a commonplace; usually it involves being spotted in a gay bar or cruising on Grindr. What cost Voris his position at Church Militant were multiple in stances of sending shirtless selfies to his staff. An investigation by Restoring the Faith reported that Voris had “continually

habit of sexually abusing young men to come to light. Appar ently Pressler’s MO was to have a trusted subordinate set up li aisons with teenage staffers, telling them that sex with Pressler was a “God-sanctioned secret.” But the scandal that’s rocking Texas politics is that Pressler’s most recent procurer was an at torney named Jared Woodfill who’s currently running for state senator, with the backing of Texas Attorney General Ken Pax ton. Charges and lawsuits against Pressler go back to 2004, but Woodfill continued to supply him with potential victims. What was in it for Woodfill isn’t entirely clear; perhaps it was purely fiduciary, which returns the spotlight to Pressler, that sad sack who apparently enjoyed talking trash with staffers about hot guys and recent conquests when not at the pulpit denouncing “the LGBTQ lifestyle,” among other sins of the flesh. Reconcile This We may think we have a reasonable grasp of the men who made up the mob on January 6th, 2021—he’s a stereo typical Loser who doesn’t have a girlfriend and can’t hold down a job—but a recently convicted Proud Boy member doesn’t seem to compute. Steven Miles is a gay adult film actor who performs under the name Sergeant Miles, and he’s had a suc cessful career with Lucas Entertainment, Falcon, Hot House, and Raging Stallion. To be sure, as a porn star he plays up the “gay thug” routine, but his sexual positioning could be described as “versatile.” What’s fascinating is that he tows the line com pletely in his Proud Boy role, going on about the “Deep State” and the stolen 2020 election, having sported a T-shirt on Janu ary 6th that read: “Trump 2020 Fuck Your Feelings.” His social media postings ooze with misogynistic comments about “femi nazis and idiot Hillary supporters,” and he slammed the porn studios as “scared little bitches” for shutting down during the pandemic. And here is where he seems to be telling us some thing about the Proud Boys that we should heed. There seems to be little room for women in their movement, much less for the values of love and empathy that women represent. For Steven aka Sergeant Miles at least, the ability to toggle between Proud Boy and Pride Boy (of a sort) makes perfect sense. Problem Solved January 6th was back in the news when con servative Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk discussed a hypothetical situation related to the insurrection: “If the insur rectionists had started a gay orgy instead of vandalizing the Capitol, attempting to kill elected officials, and beating police officers, none of them would have been prosecuted. ... They should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex. That would have solved all the problems.” We need to un derstand the mindset that could conceivably find its way to this conclusion. He’s not just saying that homosexuality is so widely accepted that no one would have noticed it amid the chaos of the day. He’s suggesting that it’s so positively valued that engaging in it would actually have indemnified these ac tors from criticism and possibly from prosecution. Ah, well, one can imagine one of these Woke politicians sighing: “Surely if they were bad trespassers, they would not have taken the time to engage in such an upstanding activity!” It’s a weird lit tle fantasy that seems apropos of nothing in particular, but if picturing male rioters getting it on in the Senate is what floats your whatever, sure, why not?

[texted] half-nude selfies to his young, sin gle male employees.” Sure, uploading these photos to the Church Militant Drop box could be chalked up to carelessness (oops!), but sending them to young men under his tutelage seems downright reck less—possibly worth the risk if it resulted in a hookup? And if indeed that was the objective, let the reader be the judge of how realistic these hopes may have been.

The Persistence of Creepiness A possible takeaway from the previous story is that “Hope springs eternal” when it comes to the male ego and its longing for the flower of youth. But the case of the 93-year-old Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler quickly returns us to the serious side of these deeply closeted gay men who go on destructive anti-LGBT rampages to ap pease their demons. Pressler’s age and longevity as a Christian leader make it all the more amazing that it took so long for his 8

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