One thing I’d like someone to explain to me about this election…

Okay, I’m going to ask it: Why are so many gay men who supported Hillary vehemently against Obama and rabidly supporting McCain and Palin now? The reason I’m asking is that the video Drudge is promoting currently of Obama allegedly giving McCain the finger (yes, here we go again) came from a gay Hillary-to-McCain supporter and a lot (a majority?) of the men who self-identify as PUMAs appear to be gay. I’m baffled as to why so many of them loathe Obama. Sure, he’s against gay marriage (for the record, I’m not), but so are a lot of Democrats. A McCain/Palin administration would be awful for gay rights and Obama has come out in opposition of Prop 8 (good luck getting McCain or Palin to do that). I just don’t get it.  Any ideas? It’s gotta be about more than McClurkin, right? Or did that bad idea snowball and not stop rolling?

Honestly, just looking for an answer here…

Posted by Kevin K. on 11/03/08 at 02:26 PM • Permalink

I dunno; why are there “Log Cabin” republicans?

Maybe they just identify more with a woman. ??  I suppose there’s still a factor of minorities holding prejudices against other minorities, as well.

Who knows?  Actually, I’d guess that a lot of those men, gay or not, are actually Republicans.

I’ve been meaning to do a post on this for a while, but it’s really a function of PUMAs overall and not gay men in particular.  The thing is, PUMAs have no ideology to speak of, their politics are completely based on personal loyalty.  They were progressive in that Hillary Clinton was progressive.  Their personal loyalty was to the person, not the idea.

When Clinton lost the race and began campaigning for Obama, the PUMAs needed a new personality to attach themselves to.  They found this personality in Sarah Palin, and to a lesser extent in John McCain.  So now you have PUMA sites not just extolling conservative politicians, but conservative philosophy (see Daragh Murphy hating on Khalidi, redistributing wealth, etc.).  This isn’t a function of their politics changing; strictly speaking PUMAs have no ideology to speak of.  It’s a function of the shifting of their personal loyalties. 

It’s this dynamic that makes it hard to respond to someone like vastleft.  It’s impossible to provide a coherent response to a group that contains people who think Obama is too conservative (vastleft and the rest of the Correntians) and those who think he’s a Marxist (PUMA).

I think he’s too conservative (Obama, that is), but what I don’t get is how people would go for McCain/Palin because Obama is too centrist.

I still think the PUMAs are Republican ratfuckers and the Vastleft/Correntians are racists.  Easy as that.

But, yeah.  Log Cabin Repubs?  There are many mysteries in the world.

It’s this dynamic that makes it hard to respond to someone like vastleft.  It’s impossible to provide a coherent response to a group that contains people who think Obama is too conservative (vastleft and the rest of the Correntians) and those who think he’s a Marxist (PUMA)

Heh.  That’s the point I made to Brad Mays, the guy making the Audacity of Democracy documentary, when I talked to him on one of the Unusable Signal shows. You’ll see commenters on PUMA threads pushing both of those ideas about him (he’s the black Reagan! he’s a communist!) without anyone blinking an eye.

I’m not a big fan of Log Cabin Repubs, but I think they’re also in it for conservative economic & foreign policy/security reasons. I don’t really advocate boxing anyone into one-issue constraints. I don’t get the flip with Hillary supporters though, since it’s been pointed out ad nauseum that her policies are virtually identical to Obama’s.

I’ve kind of wondered the same thing about those women.  I don’t see how they can say they identify with a woman as a reason for their vote.  The only thing Hillary and Sarah have in common is the plumbing. I come back to the assumption that they really don’t give two-shits about “The Issues”.  I doubt they are issue voters at all and are, perhaps, voting for the novelty of it all.

I think John Cain nailed it: The PUMAs of all persuasions are personality driven rather than issues driven. It cracks me up that they call us the cultists!

John Cain is right on the PUMAs’ lack of ideology.They were founded on a negative, anger. Anger against having their will thwarted, which has congealed into a consuming hatred for Obama for having the temerity to take what they consider hers/theirs.

There’s the her/me factor; they’ve so identified with Hillary that their entire position during the primaries could be summed up: How Dare He Do This To Her/Me? She/I have been unappreciated and dumped on all her/my life, She/I’ve wanted this all her/my life and this upstart just jumps in and takes it away from Her/Me!

My Mom was strongly for Hillary and gave me a variation of this: she screamed “Hillary’s wanted to be President since she was EIGHT and this BASTARD jumps in and takes it away from her!!”

Right then I should have said, “Mom, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, and you would make a great President.”

(Mom’s come around; she’s voting for Obama, just like 17,999,784 of Hillary’s 18,000,000 supporters.)

I’m not a big fan of Log Cabin Repubs, but I think they’re also in it for conservative economic & foreign policy/security reasons. I don’t really advocate boxing anyone into one-issue constraints.

Nor do I, but when you talk about economic/trade issues, those are somewhat trivial (IMO) when you’re talking about a party that actively seeks to relegate you to second-class citizen status.

That’s what I’m saying.

As a gay man in New York City, I have some insight into at least a few of these gay Puma types.

For a lot of these guys, their preference towards Hillary turned into a stereotypical gay diva-worship.  She became Cher, Madonna, Effie to them.  When I asked them why they supported the Clintons when they were the people behind “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), their responses were always related to personality: “she’s tough”, “she’s been through so much and you can’t keep her down”.

So like the PUMA women, they looked for reasons to hate Obama - McClurkin, his ambivalence toward gay marriage.  And they dug in.  Like most women for Hillary, most of them came around for Obama when he won the nomination and the only other choice was McSame, but there are still some holdouts.

I wondered about this very issue when I was listening to last week’s This American Life about the election, where they had a couple of former Hillary supporters who were canvassing for McCain, at least one of whom certainly sounded gay (maybe a stereotype, but bear with me). Sure, it’s all anecdotal evidence, but based on TV interviews that I’ve seen and the like, I’d say an astonishing percentage of these men who supported Hillary and now back McCain are gay. I’m interested in the psychological explanations that people have given here, because it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense for these guys to switch from Hillary to McCain.

I don’t get it myself, but Michael’s argument seems to make sense—I think for all the “Obamabot” arguments, the cult of personality around Hillary from her most ardent supporters was pretty astonishing, as if she were the only woman who had ever run for office, struggled against sexism, etc. For people like me who have been following feminism since my early teens, I kinda wondered where this was coming from—the idea that ONLY Hillary could be The One.

Plus, let’s not forget that gay white men are still white, and there are plenty of gay black activists who could give you an earful about the racism in the white gay community, particularly among older men who tend to have the same prejudices as anyone else of their generation. I think this generational split also explains the tone deafness and dismissiveness (bordering on racism) so many older white feminists (Jong, Morgan, Steinem) exhibited toward Obama’s candidacy—for example, Steinem claiming that black men had the right to vote before women in her NY Times op/ed before New Hampshire, which conveniently failed to note that some really nasty things happened to black men who tried to exercise that right.

Brian Freeman, the author of “Civil Sex” (a play from about ten years ago about Bayard Rustin, the gay architect of King’s March on Washington), talked about this in a documentary on San Francisco’s Castro District broadcast several years ago on the Bay Area PBS affiliate. He got off the bus his first day in the Castro and saw that a bar was having a “Gone With The Wind” party, complete with “masters” and “slaves.” He said something like “Well, I’d heard that this was the neighborhood for ‘my people,’ but I didn’t see a lot of ‘my people’ there.”

To be fair, it’s also interesting that conservative black Christians don’t translate their experience of discrimination on race to understanding the struggle of gay Americans to secure basic civil and human rights. The takeaway is, I guess, that just because someone has been discriminated against, it doesn’t necessarily help enlighten them to the fact that others are also suffering under oppressive conditions and laws.

I tend to agree with Michael and Kerry.

I also want to add a couple of points.

I think part of the reason many gay men supported Hillary is because their leadership were pretty much establishment type leaders. Gay people look favorably on the Clinton yrs and they accept the leadership of people who were attached to Clinton, and we know who those “leaders” were. One of the strongest pillars of support for gay movement in the States were the old school feminists like Steinem and Jong and Emilys List and they rabidly supported Hillary and they expected the activists in gay community to fall in line behind supporting Hillary. I say this because a lot of gay men I know were very opinionated about Obama and seem to get their talking points from their leadership who in turn got their talking points from the most rabid wing of Hillary’s feminists supporters, like Maria Pappas..all men are bad, men are evil..except of course gay men..etc etc

the other problem was, at least from where I stand in Chicago, is that gay men, especially white, still do not trust blacks because of what they perceive to be anti homosexual culture within black community.....its not that they think of Obama as anti gay..they just feel that electing him would legitimze anti gay sentiments within African American community...Hillary andher acolytes seemed like a safer bet because no gay person was sure where Obama stood, and his attending Rev Wrights church only seemed to confirm their fears that he doesnt care about Gay and Lesbian issues at best, and at worst thinks negatively of them

As for gay men who are or were HRC holdouts, I do think diva-worship is a factor. But ‘way beyond that, there’s a sizable bunch of folks in this country who, IMO, can be fairly described as pseudo-liberal or (pushing the pretense further) pseudo-left.

These are middle-class, mostly suburban, overwhelmingly white folks, often in the ‘baby boomer’ category but sometimes younger, who are influenced by the image of liberalism and sometimes the old New Left from the ‘60’s on. They relate it all to ‘hip’ journalism and movies and rock music and other stuff they like, and give ample lip service when it’s easy to, but still retain a lot of the whitebread-hypocrite prejudices of their parents when it really counts. And a major prejudice of theirs, of course, is against African-Americans.

I think you see a whole lot, a whooooole lot, of these pseuds on ‘liberal’ internet boards. Sure, some people are just trolls, but I’m convinced that some of the folks who make what sound like trollish arguments about Obama and other matters really think they’re terribly righteous. They’re still jerks, of course. “Hillary’s a real progressive and it’s about time we had a woman in the White House, but Obama’s playing the race card and I resent the fact that all the black people support him,” etc.

I like old ‘60’s music too, and would reference the obvious Phil Ochs song here, along with this item:  “I hear the sound of marching feet, down Sunset Boulevard to Crescent Heights, and there at Pandora’s Box, we are confronted with a vast quantity of...”

Being gay doesn’t make you smart.
McCain lovin’ gays are A-Holes. Nuff’ said.

I chalk a lot of it up to unacknowledged racism. Just think of the idea of an entitlement to the nomination, if Edwards, or Biden, or Richardson, or any of the others had won the nomination, Hillary would have been more likely to step down in the spring instead of fighting tooth and nail through the summer. There would have been no, “how dare he take this from me!” even from someone like Edwards, a younger man with not much experience, just like Obama.

If you ask any person of color they will understand this, that many liberal people who do not think of themselves as racists, really are only pretending that we are equal. Once the person of color actually begins to believe it, and acts on it, by challenging the white person, questioning them, arguing with them, going their own way and making different decisions, that’s when things go wonky. “How dare you question me!” and God forbid the person of color actually think they are better and advance beyond their “non-racist” friend or colleague.

I don’t know how many times I and others have said it, but conservative racism is out in the open and hostile; liberal racism is paternalism. We’re their pets or children, but we better know our place and not get too uppity. Obama got uppity didn’t stay in his place. They can’t stand that.

Oh and Kerry, I wanted to say one thing about this:

for example, Steinem claiming that black men had the right to vote before women in her NY Times op/ed before New Hampshire

She meant before WHITE women in her NY Times op/ed. Now, yes, I do realize all women were in the same boat, no women could vote, but if “women” were given the vote before blacks...can you think of a few women who would still be unable to vote? So many of us women of color do not trust white feminists, because when they speak for “women” they usually only mean white women. I’m not saying that men of color are never sexist, because they are sometimes, but when they are fighting for rights they mean all of us, not just black/brown men. They are our grandfathers, fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. They aren’t offering a false “sisterhood” it’s real family.

I just wanted to mention that, because many people have asked, “Why are black women choosing black (Obama) over womanhood (Clinton)?” and I can’t speak for black women exactly, because I am Native American, but I know that those women insulted me, Jong, Steinem, and the other feminists who tried to bully me into voting for the vagina candidate. I can’t see how one wealthy privileged white woman breaking her glass ceiling improves conditions for the rest of us. I couldn’t see it with Hillary Clinton and I can’t see it with Sarah Palin.

Gay or straight, the PUMAs are all rat fuckers.

I haven’t been to any of the PUMA lairs on the internons except one that I’m pretty sure is a spoof, but a) We know people don’t always vote their best interests. This race is close because millions of our fellow Americans are dumber than a sack of hammers. b) I suspect there is a higher than normal sockpuppetry on those sites. c) A favorite fighting tactic of the mentally diminished is to assume an identity to strengthen their argument. You know “I’m a black mother of six children and I just LOVE Sarah Palin.” Same shit, different persona.

Katiebird basically has just confirmed my thesis.  And wouldn’t you know it, vastleft is voting for Obama, it seems primarily out of disgust for the pro-McCain PUMAs.  It seems in the end he couldn’t take that leap into crazytown.

Katiebird: “I spit on this election.”

Hah.

WTF? All us bone-smokers and fudge-packers up here are votin’ for Hopey.

Another Donna, you are absolutely right.

Whenever I read any of the screeds during this campaign from old-school white feminists like Morgan (the WORST, in my view, if only because I used to respect her, whereas I never respected Jong), I’d wonder if they even bothered to think about how their words sounded to women of color. Now, plenty of black women supported Hillary (Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, RIP), and that’s of course fine—gee, people are individuals and make up their own minds, who’da thunk it? But the commentary from the white feminist power structure managed to highlight just why feminists of color like bell hooks and Audre Lord and Alice Walker had it right to criticize the unexamined privilege of the movement’s white leadership—this one wealthy white woman who mostly (and ironically) owed her career to her marital status was somehow the Greatest Feminist Icon Ever and anyone who preferred Obama was just a retarded misogynist.

People like Steinem, despite her shout-out to Shirley Chisholm in that op-ed piece (the rhetorical equivalent of “some of my best friends are black"), managed to completely marginalize and “disappear” women of color in their writing and other commentary this election season, much as the original suffragists told Ida B. Wells to march at the back of the parade or not at all.