Conservative closet cases

Gay men in the 50s were less closeted than moderately conservative couples in blue metros

In April of last year I was in the Austin area to watch the solar eclipse, relaxing in the shady back yard of the house we had rented for the occasion. We were hosting some local boomer relatives of one of the attendees to our eclipse party, and I was shooting the shit with an older gentleman, beers in hand, discussing how quickly one’s retinas might be damaged by foolishly looking at the sun unshielded. Surely it was fine to just take a peek real quick-like, I joked. His manner abruptly shifted. “You’d burn your eyes out like Great Leader did,” he snarled. It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t talking about Kim Jung Un, but rather Trump, who had been photographed squinting up at an eclipse without eye protection during his first term in 2017.

This was an obscure non-story from seven years earlier, one of a countless sequence of similar “Experts Agree Orange Man Bad, Wrong” stories published during Trump’s first term. I only knew about it from “dudes rock” memes posted by right-wing jokers on Twitter. He must have been reminded about it by his own media bubble.

“You know, I really wish somebody would just blow his head off already,” he continued, not missing a beat. I made a non-committal noise in response, took a slug off my longneck, and changed the subject back to the eclipse.

This incident was weird, but not for the surface reason. The weird thing wasn’t this retiree I had met ten minutes earlier casually wishing death on a political figure supported by roughly half the country. No, the truly bizarre thing was how pedestrian this kind of occurrence had become in my own life, how inured to it I had become. It should be unusual for someone to make inflammatory political remarks to a fellow countryman after having known him only ten minutes. But it’s not. It happens thousands of times every day in professional middle-class circles like the ones I travel in.

In these circles, being liberal is the default, and therefore all liberals are “out”: everyone knows that a lib is a lib, and they talk about their politics freely, indeed nearly non-stop in many cases. By contrast, even moderate conservatives in such circles are usually closeted. They keep their heads down and their mouths shut. If the liberals know that conservatives walk silently amongst them, they sure don’t see it as any reason to watch their mouths. On the contrary, they seem to sincerely believe that everyone around them believes more or less the same things they do. They therefore say the most nakedly partisan, divisive things in mixed company, serenely confident they are surrounded by fellow travelers, blissfully ignorant of who in their lives might disagree with them.

On the morning after the 2024 election, Mrs. Kitten and I awoke relieved that Harris had lost. We didn’t love Trump, but we voted for him, and were glad he won, especially considering the alternative¹. But by mid morning, my wife had received text messages from a handful of girlfriends offering condolences, offering a shoulder to cry on if she needed to vent, reminding her that resistance was now more important than ever for women across the country. They had no idea she wasn’t one of them, and why would they? She politely avoids the topic with people who aren’t safe, they make assumptions. Gay men in 1950’s America were less closeted than moderately conservative women in contemporary blue metros.

My wife and I are closeted conservatives in a big blue metro. We work professional jobs and dress nicely. We are educated, intelligent, open-minded about culture. We keep our mouths shut about politics in mixed company. We pass.

But privately, and in hushed conversations with peers we’ve sussed out are closeted as well, we disagree with much of the progressive dogma our social circle blasts on social media. We want radically reduced immigration and the deportation of illegal aliens. We don’t want to defund the police, in fact we want more criminals in prison for longer. We don’t want elementary teachers explaining that our kids might have been born into the wrong body.

But we are coming up on a full decade in which to voice one of these opinions in the wrong company is to risk ostracization or worse. In 2015, I worried I could lose my job for making the wrong joke. Today I worry about which parents would no longer let their kids play at our house. So we stay quiet, we nod along when it’s expected of us, we restrict our forbidden conversations to safe associates, we keep our friends.

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Online, when I discuss the topic of being closeted, self-righteous people show up to demand that I come out. Shouldn’t I disown all the acquaintances I can’t be out with? Shouldn’t I move my family to a conservative area where we can live our values more authentically? Aren’t I being a coward?

We have of course made changes in response to the encroachment of politics on our lives over the last decade. There are friends we see less often. I left a very lucrative job in large part because I found the culture stultifying². Obviously personal authenticity is important, and I don’t endorse a closeting strategy that leaves you miserable. Everyone self-censors about certain things in certain contexts, but there’s a line, and you’ll know when you’ve crossed yours.

But I also think demands to be completely “out” with one’s politics in every social relationship and context reflects a totalizing worldview that inappropriately elevates the political above the personal and the human. Personal relationships are built on the bond of shared experiences and memories, not on shared voting records. You will end up in important relationships with people who disagree with you, and the right thing to do when this happens, the decent thing, is to agree to disagree, forgive and forget, when you accidentally trespass some important boundary. Enforcing conformity in belief on everyone in your life is the mad dream of the zealot or the evangelist, not the friend or the son.

And because this sadly does need to be said, it is wrong to cut friends or family out of your life due to differences in political beliefs, and if you do so you’re a bad person³. It’s wrong in both a moral sense and in a utilitarian analysis: it will make you unhappy to do so. You are not a righteous person with a purer social group, you are a foolish person with a smaller, less interesting one. You are poorer, for no reason other than your own vanity.

As for moving to the country to be with “our people”: much to our chagrin, our people are the urban libtards, and we love them dearly. We would not feel at home in a community that voted for Trump as lopsidedly as ours did for Harris. Their customs are not ours, their natural proclivities and interests clash badly with our own. We are centrist liberals⁴ by disposition and character, and it’s primarily due to the recent madness of the American left that we now find ourselves so far on the right.

And this is how we ultimately choose to view dear friends of ours posting insane screeds on social media: they are caught up in a mass hysteria, and there but for the grace of God go we.

We know from private conversation, away from group pressure, that many of our peers agree with us substantially on the issues. As much as we self-censor, we aren’t complete cyphers or frauds, our friends know exactly what we believe on a broad range of topics. But as much as they might agree with us on substance, they would never dream of voting Republican, let alone self-identifying as “conservative”, or worse, a Trump supporter. And they assume we feel the same. It would be as unthinkable as a sudden conversion to Sikhism (or worse, evangelical mega-church Protestantism).

They are in the grips of a madness much bigger than them, and these matters of identity are sacrosanct, irreducible, impervious to mere argument. We pray that they wake from the fever dream, but it’s not our job to administer the smelling salts. It’s our job to be their friends, their sons and daughters. To love them, as we hope they would love us even if the full extent of our heresy were laid bare.

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Do progressive-minded people in deep red areas feel the same need to hide from social reproach? Are Harris voters in such areas reluctantly leaving their campaign yard signs in the boxes, afraid of what their neighbors might think or do? I imagine this must be true to some extent, but I have no personal experience with it. What I do have a lot of experience with is progressives, and I have a hard time believing they would back away from a fight the way so many conservatives do in the name of getting along.

There’s an asymmetry here. Despite an almost pathological need on the part of progressives to claim the mantle of the underdog, it’s difficult not to notice who holds the reins of actual power in America. Liberal norms rule at every important cultural institution, from colleges to foundations to libraries and museums. They obtain in the boardroom of every major corporation. They dictate what television shows and films get made, who is cast in them, who writes and directs them. They are entrenched in every HR department. It’s the libs’ world; the rest of us just live in it.

Over 20% of our city voted for Trump in each of his three elections, one in five of us, but in our entire city I did not see a single yard sign with his name on it in those ten years. Why is that? In the leadup to the last election Mrs. Kitten and I would sometimes joke about putting a Trump sign in our front yard. It’s a joke because it’s unthinkable. In the best case, we would make enemies of some neighbors. It’s likely the sign would get stolen or vandalized. And if we got unlucky, we might get a rock through our window. Or worse.

The events of the last few weeks bring a new focus and urgency to this topic that I hadn’t felt before. Normal conservatives are coming to understand that a substantial lunatic fringe on the left is only too willing to condone violence to silence opinions they don’t like. I agree with a lot of what Charlie Kirk believed — if he was a legitimate target, why wouldn’t I be? Is it any wonder we keep our views to ourselves, that we use pseudonyms online?

It feels like something has changed, maybe forever, and I haven’t fully internalized what this means for those of us in the closet. Would a more vocal conservative presence in professional circles have forced normal liberals to confront the increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric about conservatives foisted by mainstream media outlets for the last decade? Would it matter to them to know that some of their friends are the villains being accused of ending American democracy on MSNBC? I don’t know. I have to believe that most of them aren’t so far gone that real human connections couldn’t make an enormous difference. But I’m not sure.

And for me, and for the people reading this in sympathy, the relevant question is: are you willing to go first?

1. Even setting aside her abjectly terrible policy positions, we were genuinely dismayed with Harris as a candidate — we had never witnessed a presidential candidate as obviously stupid, such an empty shell of a person, someone so completely lacking in substance.

2. Some of the friends we don’t see as often anymore chided me when I articulated my frustration with that culture, “Aw, Kitten can’t tell offensive jokes, poor baby.” Of course this blithely misses the point — if I’m always having to check myself and read the room and think twice before cracking wise, it robs the act of much of its joy even if I ultimately do make the joke. You made my personality illegal and then called me a poor sport for objecting!

3. Sometimes people cut off relationships for abusive behavior that takes the form of political harangues, which isn’t the same thing. But if you give your mom an ultimatum about how she has to vote to see her grandkids, you’re a bad person whether you proudly post the video to tik tok or not.

4. Liberal in the classical sense: not “progressive”, but “broadly tolerant of differences”.