Is the GOP gossiping that Ron DeSantis is gay?
Let’s examine a smear campaign
Everyone knows that Ron DeSantis is heterosexual. The governor of Florida is married and has three kids. So why is there so much gossip about his sexuality?
The insinuation is made, repeatedly, insistently, that DeSantis is gay—which to be clear is absolutely not true.
Not even a little bit.
In the right-wing world, of course, everyone is trying to out-man each other.
Heterosexuality in a tall, brusque, commanding style is seen to be the gold standard of political leadership.
And so often, Ron DeSantis just seems to fall…short.
His footwear has been an ongoing crisis.
It was kicked off by a famous pair of boots in 2022.
DeSantis’ white boots haunted the right wing mind.
The boots seemed to grow and grow, feminizing and enveloping DeSantis’ whole leg, until he was nearly in drag.
DeSantis’ past didn’t seem so masculine either.
Did DeSantis’ time in the Navy really amount to examining urine samples?
What all was going on in the showers in the Congress building? Jim Bridenstine seemed to like to talk about their daily encounters.
There’s speculation about his being mildly autistic.
They call him ‘Ron DeSpectrum’. And his sexuality is regularly held up for inspection. He’s called “fruity,” “effeminate” and a “femboy.” He’s called ‘Dee Santis’ or ‘Rhonda Santis’.
“I wonder how much his polling would improve if he just came out?” goes the famous GOP troll Brenden Dilley.
Is there a certain gayness to his political operation? His press secretary, Bryan Griffin, is gay. They often travel together. As Dilley puts it: “I’m not assuming anything… but…”
A special effort to defame DeSantis started out on the evening of November 7, 2022.
Just before the midterm election, Donald Trump gave FoxNews an interview. Responding to talk that DeSantis might run, Trump said he could “hurt himself very badly,” and that it would be a “mistake.”
“If he runs, he runs,” Trump said. “I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody — other than, perhaps, his wife, who is really running his campaign.”
Trump is no fan of DeSantis—or her husband. Donald Trump refers to Ron as “Tiny D.” But did he know details that could be…embarrassing?
Trump has a longtime habit of mobilizing gossip for political advantage.
Was he ready to spill some details? The very idea was received by many Republicans as menacing. The right-wing reporter Byron York tweeted:
“Trump tries to threaten — blackmail? — DeSantis out of the race.”
These Republicans seem to allow that DeSantis might be keeping secrets. The ire was directed at Trump for threatening to divulge them.
Trump released a statement on DeSantis.
It was a long tale of DeSantis requiring his help to become governor. “Ron came to me in desperate shape,” Trump says of the meeting that led to an endorsement.
The subtext was clear. DeSantis is feminine, or not the ‘man’ who stands up by himself. As when Trump suggested that Casey DeSantis ran his campaign, the idea was that DeSantis’ masculinity was compromised.
All that was received by many Republicans as damaging to Trump—as unhinged, as him “going postal.” DeSantis seemed leaderly in not replying.
Trump kept up the sex talk.
Amid his own legal battles in the face of apparent ‘hush’ money to a woman, he posted on March 20th:
There were other insinuations that DeSantis is gay.
On November 10th, 2022, a T.V. courtroom drama on the Paramount network, The Good Fight, aired an episode titled “The End of Everything.”
The storyline was about a man named Felix Staples, played by John Cameron Mitchell, who arriving at a law firm to press a case that Ron DeSantis had sexually assaulted him.
Staples says that he’d arrived at CPAC, the Republican gathering, to work on DeSantis’ speech, but there: “He drugged me and forced me into oral sex.”
The storyline was allusive of stories by Monica Lewinsky and Christine Blasey Ford.
The story collapses under scrutiny.
Felix Staples is revealed to be a liar who was trying to harm Ron DeSantis and benefit Trump. But the episode wasn’t received, puzzlingly, as a story of a gay liar making a false accusation.
It was received by right-wing people as a “smear” on DeSantis.
Despite the overt plot, that is, the underlying references had worked to suggest that the charge was true.
The gay right-wing figure Milo Yiannopoulos is no DeSantis fan.
He calls him “that Tallahassee trollop in mom jeans.” With some tart remarks on DeSantis’ height, Milo launched into a Telegram thread on rumors circulating that Ron DeSantis was gay or bisexual.
He suggests that The Good Fight writers got DeSantis’ sexual tastes wrong. “He is definitely a bottom. You can just trust me on that.”
Milo followed up with a graphic.
If DeSantis was gay, his career might read differently.
We’d look back on the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida, for example, as tinged by personal motivation.
In the 2018 election cycle, DeSantis barely fended off Democrat Andrew Gillum, who was later outed in a hotel room scene featuring meth and a male escort.
DeSantis’ opponent in the most recent election was Charlie Crist, who of course has been widely surmised to be gay.
One might even being to wonder if being a closeted gay man was a requirement to run for governor in the state of Florida.
DeSantis is the heterosexual man he seems to be.
But if he wasn’t…what would he do to keep the secret? 🔶