The 13%: Why These LGBTQ Voters Are Thrilled About Trump’s Win
Five gay and lesbian voters share why they voted for President-elect Donald Trump.
On Nov. 5th, Donald Trump was elected as America’s 47th U.S. president. More than 76 million Americans voted for him, including 60% of men and 53% of white women.
Despite this turnout, an overwhelming 86% of LGBTQ people voted for Kamala Harris, compared to just 13% for Trump. Harris actually had a stronger performance among LGBTQ voters than any other candidate in the last five elections.
Trump ran on a campaign of transphobia. He spent more money on anti-trans ads than on any other issue and he repeatedly vowed to crack down on “transgender insanity.” Since his win, he has nominated aggressively anti-LGBTQ cabinet members, including Marco Rubio, who has called the Respect for Marriage Act a “stupid waste of time,” and Kristi Noem, who disagreed with the Obergefell decision to legalize same-sex marriage.
Why, then, did an estimated 1.5 million LGBTQ-identifying Americans think Trump was the better candidate for U.S. President?
Uncloseted Media spoke with five gay and lesbian Trump supporters to find out.
Andy Blalock, 41, Huntsville, Alabama
Andy Blalock believes Donald Trump “transformed the Republican party” to be more inclusive. “The party of joy,” he told Uncloseted Media. He references Trump’s appointment of Richard Grenell as the first openly gay person to a cabinet-level position and that during his first term, “he didn’t touch gay marriage.”
In August, Blalock launched the Huntsville chapter for the Log Cabin Republicans, a national advocacy organization that aims to educate Republicans about LGBTQ issues. “They view LGBTQ issues as a settled matter. What rights do we not have right now?” he says. “I can get whatever job I want. I married my life partner, the man of my dreams. Under Trump, my business was booming. My First and Second Amendment rights were protected,” he says.
As an eighth-grade teacher, Blalock supports some of the many anti-LGBTQ bills that recently passed into law, including Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prohibits teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom.
“You should not be teaching that,” says Blalock, who lives on a horse ranch with his husband.
“Have whatever pronouns you want. But I was brought up to have proper English, and I'm not going to say ‘they’ if it doesn’t apply as they, I’m gonna say ‘he’ or ‘she.’”
Trump has lied about kids going to school and coming back with sex changes. But in Blalock’s “interpretive thoughts,” he says what Trump meant is that kids are “finding out about gender pronouns, sex changes, and girls wanting to be cats and boys wanting to act like dogs [at school].”
Blalock believes kids should learn about LGBTQ issues through counseling services and only when they have parental permission—which is difficult for the 45% of LGBTQ kids who reported wanting mental health care but were concerned about obtaining consent from their parents.
“We shouldn't be grooming children,” he says.
Arielle Scarcella, 38, Miami, Florida
The idea that teachers and Democrats are grooming and indoctrinating children has become a widespread conspiracy theory that has been perpetuated on social media platforms like X, which is the source of information Arielle Scarcella trusts the most. “I don't really follow any news outlets. I just follow accounts that will post videos without any manipulation to them,” she told Uncloseted Media.
She believes President Joe Biden is “a creep. I think he’s legitimately probably a P-word,” says Scarcella, a 38-year-old lesbian who moved to Miami from New York City a few years ago.
“I think there's videos that prove it,” she says, referencing clips of President Biden “sniffing kids.” The Associated Press found these claims to be “false” because the sniffing sounds were added to the original video.
“He’s still creepy,” Scarcella says in response to the AP article and points to other examples.
Misinformation was hard to clamp down on this election cycle after Republican attorneys general and other lawmakers led a yearslong campaign aimed at forcing social media companies to platform falsehoods and hate speech.
Americans were flooded with misleading information about transgender issues, among other topics. Elon Musk, who donated more than $130 million to the Trump campaign, posted election misinformation multiple times, including one instance where he falsely stated that Michigan was committing mass voter fraud. The post was viewed more than 32 million times.
Scarcella—who trusts information from social media creators more than mainstream news outlets—has become an influencer in her own right. On Instagram, she posts videos to her roughly 103,000 followers where she mocks teachers who ask their students for their pronouns and uses racist language where she describes Harris as “not even, like, full Black” and as “Black at different times of the day depending on what state she’s giving a speech.”
Scarcella says she had to “come out” as a Trump supporter. “Dating is difficult,” she says. “People call me every name under the book. Transphobic, homophobic.” She says this is particularly difficult because “people that have been my type tend to lean very left.”
Melissa Vitelli, 37, Brooklyn, New York
Many Trump-supporting LGBTQ people have faced stigma because of their political beliefs. Melissa Vitelli is no exception.
A day after the election, Vitelli posted a video of herself in Trump merchandise alongside her wife. Shortly after, she remembers some of her 400,000 TikTok followers attacking her in the comments: “I can't wait till your marriage is invalid,” “I can't wait till you lose all your rights,” and “I can't wait till she leaves you.”
Vitelli, a devout Trump supporter since 2016, says before she met her wife she experienced stigma in the lesbian dating pool. She remembers a 12-hour date that was quickly soured when politics came up. Since meeting her wife, who wrote in Bernie Sanders this election, they have had to navigate their political differences. “We'll talk about issues and we often meet in the middle. I feel like a lot of the country would be so much better off if they just started talking, because at the end of the day, most of us want the same thing,” she told Uncloseted Media.
Vitelli and her wife’s inter-political marriage is a rarity in today’s climate. Only 3.6% of marriages are between Democrats and Republicans.
Still, they support each other. “I never forced her to love [Trump] because she never forced me to hate him,” she says.
As a woman living in Brooklyn, Vitelli believes the influx of undocumented immigrants is jeopardizing her safety. “It's these 30-year-old men coming here without families who don't necessarily respect women in their culture,” she says. “I should feel safe in my own country,”
Trump has said he would protect women “whether [they] like it or not.” He has at least 26 allegations of sexual misconduct and rape, including one instance where he was found liable in court.
Despite this, Vitelli feels safe at Trump rallies. She says that as a lesbian, she can be herself and no one will think she’s anything but equal. “And that’s how I want to feel as an American,” she says.
Trump’s LGBTQ voter strategy involved attacking the transgender community and focusing only on gays and lesbians.
“We have been completely hijacked by the "TQIA+" movement,” she says. “Realistically, I think that the 13% that voted for Trump just want to live and let live … And that's who I identify with.”
Jason Oakes, 25, Ashburn, Virginia
25-year-old self-described “health nut” Jason Oakes never could have imagined voting for Trump until this year. “Trump isn't my favorite politician because he's more of a businessman. There are parts of [him] I don't really like. He's a bit unprofessional,” Oakes told Uncloseted Media.
It was Trump’s ally and newly appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that swayed him.
“I agree with a lot of the stuff [Kennedy] says about ultra-processed foods, the stuff that's in them is terrible. I work out a lot and I also try to eat super healthy and stick to Whole Foods. And for that reason, I don't really want the chemicals, additives, all that stuff in there going into my body.”
While Oakes acknowledges that Kennedy has had some “controversies,” such as his anti-vaccine activism, he writes them off as “out there opinions.”
Kennedy has said that “100% of the first thousand” people who died of AIDS were addicted to poppers and “were part of a gay lifestyle,” and thinks that kids are being “made trans” from exposure to chemicals in the environment, equating them to “frogs in a lab.”
Despite this, Oakes is reassured that under a Trump administration, his rights as a gay man are safe. “He would also speak on things like equal rights, saying ‘marriage is here to stay. I'm not going to touch it. You're free to marry whoever you want without the government getting involved.’ It helped ease some of my anxieties about it,” he says.
Keith Lynch, 33, Flower Mound, Texas
33-year-old gay police officer Keith Lynch voted for Trump because he thinks he’s better on economic policy and law and order. He remembers in 2020, at the height of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, feeling abandoned by New York City, where he was living and working at the time.
“They didn't give [us] enough resources to help mitigate the protests,” Lynch told Uncloseted Media, adding that he remembers colleagues having bricks and glass bottles thrown at them.
Even though Trump was president at the time, Lynch thought it was “disgusting” that Kamala Harris called the protests mostly peaceful and “critically important” to what became known as a racial reckoning in the U.S.
He voted for Trump because of his pledge to "launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America" because he believes undocumented immigrants are creating more crime, something that a 2024 study from the National Institute of Justice proved false. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate for property crimes.
In addition to immigration issues, Lynch—like 93% of Trump supporters—says economic policy was a “very important” factor to his vote. He points to Trump mentioning that he was considering exempting police officers from federal income taxation.
He remembers during the pandemic banking on a raise that never materialized and his husband being out of a job.
“It's an embarrassing issue. I couldn't afford a fucking cup of coffee,” he says. “I did buy some space heaters just to keep us warm.”
As inflation ramped up, “it got to the point where it was like, ‘this marriage is going to fail. Everything that I built is crumbling.’” Lynch was forced to declare bankruptcy in February 2023 and he and his husband left New York and moved to Flower Mound, Texas, where he got another job as a police officer.
As a proud Puerto Rican, Lynch brushes off Tony Hinchcliffe's comment at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally where he called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage," as “shock comedy.”
He says “media bias” is another reason he voted for Trump. “Is [Trump] an asshole? Of course. But there's nothing worse than being lied to on a grand scale.”
While Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his first term, Lynch says, “The American public as a whole, is kind of over the bullshit. Like, feed us the truth.”
Additional reporting by Sam Donndelinger
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It seems that all these people share one attitude in common, one I suspected all along is epidemic among LGBTQ+ folks who voted for the Trumpster: "It won't impact ME."
In other words, "I'm alright, Jack." More directly, "I got mine, so screw you."
They fantasize that they are so well-established, so safe, that nothing is going to happen to them, that if trans folks are successfully stripped of their rights that they will not be next. Martin Niemöller might have something to say about that, especially at a time when the idea of overturning Obergefell has already been discussed in SCOTUS.
That is, they are selfish fools who by their attitudes (and electoral choices) mock the struggles and sacrifices of those who got them to where they are.
Finally, on a different point: The one who justified their anti-trans bigotry of refusing to say "they" by claiming it's because it's "ungrammatical" is flat-out wrong. Using "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun has existed since the 14th century and while sometimes frowned upon in formal writing, has long been acceptable in common usage.
So 5 different groups of people all got the rights so the rest of us should just be quiet and sit down and be eliminated?
Not one of them understands that it was drag queens and transgender who stood up to the police at Stonewall. Without us there would be no Stonewall. Without us you would still be fighting for your gay rights and your right to marriage. These are 2 other things the transgender people have supported. Along with supporting a woman's right to choose. So, to the " We have ours so we don't care crowd," thank you for your NONconsideration for the rest of us.