Is George Santos Gay? It’s Time to Examine Tokenism and Political Grift

 

[Image generated using MidJourney]

Here, have a portrait of George Santos, who liked to claim he was the embodiment of the American Dream! 

As you have probably heard, Santos is a new Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, recently elected to represent a district in New York at the youthful age of 34. You probably also heard that he lied about some things.

Well, most things. 

Santos' political biography during his successful run for Congress stated that his maternal grandparents were Jewish Ukrainians who fled the Holocaust to Brazil. Then his parents immigrated to the U.S., making him a proud American Jew. When his political stances were attacked as fascist on Twitter, he snapped back, "You just pulled the Nazi card on the grandson of Holocaust refugees." Not so; his maternal grandparents were born in Brazil and were Catholic, as is his family today. Santos' response to genealogists tracking his ancestry and discovering he’d lied about it was to say he never said he was Jewish, just "Jew-ish." 

As a candidate, Santos said that he was born in poverty and attended an ordinary public school in New York, but went on to attend the prestigious and pricey private Horace Mann high school, followed by a B.A. from Baruch College and an M.B.A from NYU. He stated that he graduated in the top 1% of his college class, and was also the much-loved star of the volleyball team. 

All of these claims were lies. He never went to college or grad school. He never went to a fancy private high school. In fact, his highest degree was a GED.

Santos also made up stories about his family. His mother rose from poverty to be one of the top women bank executives in the country! She was killed in the 9/11 attacks! Nope. She worked long hours cleaning apartments--something worthy of respect but swept under the rug by status-seeking Santos--and died of cancer in 2016.

Santos lied about his work history. He said he worked at Citigroup and then Goldman-Sachs as an asset manager who produced extraordinary levels of revenue growth, doubling the value of assets in the space of a year. Nope. He worked at neither company. During his supposed Citigroup years, he worked as a customer service agent for Dish Network, and during the illusory Goldman-Sachs years for a Florida business called Harbor City Capitol that scammed people out of their money in a classic Ponzi scheme.

There's plenty more of these lies, but you get the idea. What I want to focus on in this post is one of Santos' keystone self-descriptions he underlined over and over during his successful political campaign. There were three such key claims, of which we've mentioned two: he was the grandson of Holocaust survivors who fled to Brazil. He was the child of poor Brazilian immigrants who rose to wild financial success on Wall Street. And thirdly, he was a rare being: an openly-gay Republican, proudly married to his husband. The media have covered the first two of these claims in plenty of detail--but have not given good coverage to the third. 

So that's what I want to do, because it will let us see some key patterns that extend far beyond one compulsively-lying narcissistic politician.

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. There is zero doubt that George Santos engaged in sexual relationships with other men. He went about this with his usual style—that is to say, acting charming, lying through his teeth, and stealing from his partner-victims. When Pedro Vilarva was 18, he started dating the then-26-year-old Santos. Santos told Vilarva he was rich but for some reason had to wait to access his funds, so Vilarva covered their expenses for months. Santos promised Vilarva a luxurious trip to Hawaii and said he’d bought the tickets. It didn’t happen. Finally, after Santos apparently pawned Vilarva’s phone, the younger man searched online, found Santos’ prosecution for stealing an acquaintance’s checkbook in Brazil and spending hundreds of dollars on suits, and kicked Santos out.

So, Santos is a jerk who manipulated a much-younger partner. But there’s no doubt they did have an intimate relationship.

Does that mean Santos is “gay”? Well, news stories have pointed out that in fact, Santos was married to a woman. These stories all refer to the fact that an uncontested divorce was finalized and recorded in December of 2019 between Santos and a woman. Two weeks later, Santos was engaging in his first political campaign, and referring to himself as an openly gay man with a fiancé. To the extent mainstream media have reported on this, it has been through the frame that since Santos was in a prior “heterosexual marriage,” either he was lying about being gay, or it was a sham marriage, perhaps entered into in order to gain citizenship. But while everything else we know about the man tells us he almost certainly deceived and manipulated this ex-wife, who seems to have solely purchased the house they lived in, let me just remind you how common bisexuality and pansexuality are. A large percentage of people who identify as gay men or lesbians have in fact had sexual relations with people not of their same gender (and a lot of folks who identify as straight have had same-gender relations).

Approaching “gay” versus “straight” as a binary, with people either being in one category or the other over the course of their lives, is just wrong. As bisexually-identified people say, “Remember the B in LGBT!” Of course, George Santos wasn’t demanding that we recognize the B—while campaigning, he called himself “gay.” I suppose you could argue that he was lying about being gay as he was actually bisexual, but by this criterion, vast swaths of people are “lying”. 

We have run into what sociologists of sexuality refer to as the “act-identity distinction.” If you survey men today who have had sexual relations both with a woman and a man in the course of their lives, some will identify as straight, some as bisexual/pansexual, and some as gay. If you add together the men who identify as either straight or gay, they seem to outnumber those who label themselves bisexual.

Are those men in the majority “lying”? I think very few people would make such an argument when encountering a man who says, “Yes, I’m gay, but when I was a high school senior and was in the closet I did have sex a few times with the girl I went to the prom with. I was trying to fit in, and she was a lovely person, but it just confirmed for me that heterosexuality isn’t my thing.”

On the other hand, there is widespread collective eye-rolling at the “straight men seeking same” crowd. These are men who regularly seek out sex with other men, but want their partners to be “normal dudes.” They often specify in solicitations that they want a manly man to drink beer with them and watch sports or straight porn while having bro-sex. Nothing “faggy” about it! In other words, they want to have their fragile masculinity and eat it, too.

What we are talking about, again, is the act-identity distinction. “Straight men seeking same” are men who want to enjoy same-sex activity without identifying with the LGBTQ+ community. They don’t want to fight discrimination; they want to sidestep it and maintain their patriarchal privilege. And they mock and disdain their fellow-travelers who are visibly queer, so they actively contribute to the marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community.

Before I trigger a pile-on, let me say that there are plenty of men who identify as straight who do so because they mostly have sexual relationships with women, but are heteroflexible. Nothing wrong with being a 1 on the Kinsey scale—a person who is mostly straight, but amenable to a bit of variety over the course of their lives! What is dishonorable is to contribute to homophobia and femmephobia, and to use that to define oneself as straight while regularly enjoying access to same-gender sex.

But George Santos isn’t doing that! No, he claims to be an “openly gay man, proudly married to another man.” Oh, though it should be noted that there’s no record of Santos marrying anyone but his ex-wife, and when Santos showed up to be sworn in to Congress, he had removed his wedding ring and there was no spouse at his side, contrary to tradition. Perhaps his current partner has joined the prior set who finally dumped him. Be that as it may, Santos wasn’t doing the cowardly thing of trying to pass as straight and doing homophobic harm to the LGBTQ+ community while being in same-gender relationships.

Santos was doing a different nasty thing. He was trumpeting a gay identity and being in a same-gender relationship while seeking to harm the LGBTQ+ community.

During the course of his campaigning, George Santos made much of his claim to being an openly gay man in order to frame himself as "brave". He claimed to have lost 4 employees at the mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub, bringing personal danger one degree of separation from his life. This was—surprise!—another lie. Reporters were unable to find employees from any company Santos claimed to have directed on the list of the Pulse murder victims. But Santos just responded that that was because they weren’t yet on payroll but were in the process of being hired, and that it was painful for him to dwell on this topic so let’s move on.

This was a favorite tactic of Santos’. When challenged on anything, claim that you are a member of a minority group and have faced trauma, and assert that this means people aren’t allowed to challenge you. Someone complains it is anti-immigrant and racist of you to say that America is supposedly in danger from illegal immigrants flooding into the country and committing crimes? “You can’t say that to me, I’m a Latino child of immigrants, and you are the racist for calling someone of my background racist!” Your anti-abortion position is challenged as anti-woman? “You can’t say that to me, my mother was a feminist hero, one of the most exalted women banking executives! You are the sexist, for saying intelligent women can’t be prolife!” Someone states your "tough-on-crime" positions against civil liberty protections are fascist? “My grandparents barely escaped the Holocaust—I can’t be a Nazi, you hypocritical fool!”

Given this pattern, you probably know what’s coming. Yes, George Santos, “openly gay and proud,” advocated for homophobic and transphobic positions. He supported Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill—now law—forbidding teachers from mentioning that LGBTQ+ people exist to elementary school students. No reading any books about real-life same-sex penguin pairs raising chicks together, or explaining to the class that the scientist bringing the fossils to school uses the pronoun “they” because they are nonbinary, not a boy or a girl. That would be “grooming!” Santos said yes, he supported the bill because it is manifestly inappropriate to “expose” children to “sexual content,” as if a teacher mentioning to their class that they have same-gender spouse is equivalent to the teacher showing the children pornography.

Santos—that “proudly married, openly gay” candidate—also opposed the Congressional Respect for Marriage Act, which protects marriage equality by law should the Supreme Court overturn its decision that same-gender marriage is protected by the Constitution. Santos said that enacting a law protecting gay marriage would impede religious freedom. And when called out on saying such a thing as a (supposedly) married gay man, he tweeted, “Sorry to tell you not all gays think alike. I challenge your antiquated thought process & reject your disdain for my beliefs. You should be ashamed. But I know you won’t be.”

This was Santos’ shtick. He positioned himself as a gay man who was against gay civil rights protections, a child of immigrants who wanted to Build the Wall, a racial minority who had no issues with the higher incarceration rates of people of color and was against college loan forgiveness, an anti-sexist man who opposed abortion rights. And he presented his positions as unassailable, because of his claimed minority statuses. He presented his (fictional) biography as proof that anyone who tries and has talent can rise from rags to riches in America. He sneered at victims of discrimination as lazy whiners, or at best victims of a Democratic conspiracy to keep people poor and dependent on state handouts so that they will vote Democratic. He declared he was a striver, a winner, and thus, of course, a Republican.

And Republicans ate it up! They loved it. That’s how a young con man with no prior political experience, and an implausible background story with enough holes to cause trypophobes to run screaming for the hills, got elected over a Democrat in blue New York.  

In a way, Santos was like another 2022 Congressional candidate, Herschel Walker. Both were presented as “minorities with the Right beliefs” to Republican voters, set against a Democrat with that background (gay in New York, Black in Georgia). Both turned out to have lied about their experiences and betrayed values they claimed to have. But that lying was uncovered early in Walker’s campaign, leading to his loss in a close election. In Santos’ case, major media didn’t examine the veracity of his claims until after the election took place, allowing him to win.

What do the cases of Santos and Walker reveal? Well, one thing that their candidacies reveal is a set of common beliefs on the American political right today. A central belief is the inversion of reality when it comes to social privilege and marginalization. It’s believed that cis straight white Anglo men are disadvantaged at every turn, because everyone else is given special privileges, affirmative action, set-asides, and solicitous consideration. People of color are supposedly given advantages over white people; women are advantaged over men, LGBTQ+ people are cosseted while cis straight people are not, etc.. In reality, all you have to do is to look at comparative income, or representation in Congress, to see this is false. There has been a modest erosion of some of the advantages cis straight Anglo white men have long enjoyed, but disparities in power and wealth still greatly advantage them. In fact, the wealth disparity between Black and white Americans has not improved since 1968. Men still hold 75% of the seats on the Senate, and over 90% of the CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies. Rights for LGB and especially T people are currently being curtailed by a rash of hundreds of state bills. 

But we live in an age where part of the ideology on the right is that if facts don’t resonate with your feeling about what the world is like, then those facts are most probably lies being perpetrated by a malicious progressive elite.

So: the belief on the right is that if you are a member of some minoritized group, you are lucky. Every organization will need to hire someone of each flavor or be persecuted by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees that are (counterfactually and ridiculously) portrayed as running the world. And your advantage, as a blessed minority member, extends also into public debate. Just as the Monopoly board game has the Get Out of Jail Free card, public discourse has a Race card, an LGBTQ+ card, a Woman card, a Disabled card, a Jewish card, etc. etc. When arguing with a person, all they have to do is pull out that card, say they are traumatized, and it is claimed that all debate stops, with the person debating the card-puller being labeled a bigot.

That’s not actually how the world works. People who are marginalized are shut down in public discourse on social media every day by mobs insulting and threatening and doxing them. But it is the fantasy of how the world works that was in operation when George Santos and Herschel Walker ran for office.

Santos, as we have seen, was deeply enamored of using this belief as a debating tactic. Whenever anyone pointed out how his policy positions hurt some minoritized group, he claimed that he (or his mother) was a member of that group, that the attacker was a bigot, that debate must stop, and that he had won conclusively. The libs had been owned!

MAGA Republicans apparently lap this stuff up. Believing (or at least claiming to believe) in minority advantage, they want to harness this perceived advantage for themselves. Believing that people who are not cis white men who have high-power jobs got handed those jobs as tokens for their communities, Republicans want to acquire useful tokens of their own. Fawning tokens. Members of minority groups who will affirm everything they say, repeat all their talking points. These Republicans believe that the token members of minority groups who oppose the position taken by most in that group will win battles for Republicans with the mythic power of their potent Race cards and Woman cards and LGBTQ+ cards.

It seems these Team Red members believe that having a token on their side also grants them permission to harm the disadvantaged without feeling guilty. The vast majority of LGBTQ+ people oppose Don’t Say Gay legislation, so homophobes seek out a George Santos, a token gay man who will support such legislation. And he incants that anyone who says a patently homophobic bill is in fact homophobic is the real bigot, because they are disrespecting his stated position, and he is gay. This magically liberates all the supporters of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation from having to face the fact that such legislation is biased, as attested by the cries of the large majority of folks impacted by it. It allows them to legitimate in their minds the idea that Don’t Say Gay legislation “has nothing to do with what adults do in the privacy of their own homes, but is just about protecting children from becoming victims of sexual abuse.” Reasonable (token) LGBTQ+ people agree!

Furthermore, being able to vote for a minoritized candidate is held to prove that the voter is in fact a righteous person who is anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ+ acceptance, etc. That is, the surface of the candidate is all that matters, not the content of their policy positions, in determining the moral character of those who vote for them. This position is actually the opposite of both the human rights perspective, and the pervasive claim of being colorblind--not seeing race, not noticing gender or sexual orientation or disability or age, and caring only about the content of a person’s character--that is popular today on the not-openly-and-intentionally-white-supremacist right. 

The idea that voting for a minoritized person proves the moral righteousness of the voter would seem to argue that Republicans today would like nothing more than a sea of disabled LGBTQ+  Jewish women of color to vote for, so long as they oppose all civil rights legislation, want to teach whitewashed history, ban gender transitions, etc..

But we can see they don’t actually want that, as most Republican national candidates remain white men. This provides more information about the nature of tokenism. The apparent perception is that if a person can vote for one Black candidate, that token serves as their talisman, warding off in perpetuity any accusations of racism, and they don’t have to vote for any more Black candidates. This is why George Santos was so surprisingly popular for someone voters had never heard of before. He positioned himself as the Holocaust-surviving Jewish Latino immigrant gay man who was the child of a feminist heroine, with all the Right positions, meaning that by voting for one token, voters were supposedly talismanically protected against critique of their positions as racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, homophobic or transphobic, or misogynist. So much bang for the buck!

One more function of token candidates for Republican politics—they get a lot of attention. They get media coverage in which they are framed as breaking barriers, or supposedly proving that there are no such barriers. And they make great clickbait, framed as “triggering the libs” by taking reactionary instead of progressive positions, especially on topics that impact the marginalized community of which the token is supposed to be a member. That’s seen as great, because it distracts from the overwhelming white maleness of the pool of Republican politicians as a whole. The 49 Republicans in the Senate today are 90% white, 82% men, and 0% openly LGBT. The numbers for Democratic politicians aren’t great, but are much more diverse than those of Republicans. For example, 80% of all Congresspeople of color today are Democrats. Having a token who is getting a lot of media attention makes Congressional Republicans seem more diverse.

This is true even when that attention is negative. George Santos may be getting dragged for all the lies he has told, but the fact that his face has been seen so much in the media makes the literal face of the Republican party seem more Latino and more gay to viewers. It’s a welcome break to a lot of people from looking at the face of Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the milky-white mass of the Republican Congressional contingent.

So: MAGA Republicans love tokens. And they apparently fantasize that this is how the world works. Most of the People who Matter are white men, but every company hires a set of tokens, not for their actual capacities as employees, but as talismans against accusations that bias lies behind persistent inequities in hiring and salaries, or where hazardous waste gets dumped, or which communities benefit from the siting of company headquarters. If the organization gets accused of bias, it pulls out its token, who pulls out their race card or queer card or whatever is needed, which slays the attacker, and then everyone can get back to business as usual.

To finish up, let me return to the question first posed. Is Santos gay? Yes, according to his own self-identification. There are plenty of people other than cis straight Anglo white men who are Republicans! There are, for example, a lot of Republican Anglo white women today, which confounds Democrats who presume women will naturally support feminism, and thus vote blue. (But despite all the babble you might hear about leftists trying to push people they see as gender-nonconforming to gender transition, the left is not telling these Republican women they have lost their woman card and need to transition and live as men. . .)

Furthermore, it is true that people of any race can deploy anti-Blackness, or any sexual orientation deploy homophobia. In fact, all of us internalize all the biases of our societies, and members of minoritized groups show that they are unconsciously biased against their own communities in implicit association tests.

So, despite his taking homophobic and transphobic positions, Santos is gay. But is Santos a member of the LGBTQ+ community? Not really, no. It’s not a formal organization—one isn’t actually a card-carrying member of the LGBTQ+ community! But requiring a certain level of support for a community’s aims and respect for its core beliefs are what make you a member of any community.

Today’s MAGA Republicans portray such an assertion as proof that the left is pathologically obsessed with “political correctness” and censorship, while conservative entities support free thought and free speech. This is counterfactual. All social groups, by definition, have some shared purpose or belief that bonds and circumscribes them. You don’t join the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom if you think MCU movies are all terrible. If you do join, and hang out on internet forums telling everyone how stupid you think the movies they like are, at first people will try to engage with you and convince you otherwise, but at some point people will start reporting you as a troll who is harming the community by mocking its values and turning positive forum conversations into fights, and some mod will give you a warning and then kick you out.

The banishment process can be quite formal in institutions respected by the right. Consider the Catholic Church. It requires members to affirm the Credo or Creed, a set of articles of faith. Catholics who deny the Creed or violate key precepts used to be excommunicated frequently. This meant they could not receive communion and were to be shunned so that they would repent. Today this is a rare action—but it is ultraconservative Catholics in the U.S. who keep urging the Church to make it common again, so that Catholics who advocate prochoice policies will be kicked out of the Church, denied communion, and publicly declared to be headed for hell unless they repent.

It is activists and politicians on the right, too, who are actively pushing for censorship—that is, official, government-sponsored policies limiting what you can say or read. It’s actually rather dizzying how fast this approach replaced its opposite as a tactic for generating outrage among conservatives. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he and his social media fans spoke endlessly about how they championed free speech. The “censors” they pointed at and squawked about were college students who asked for classrooms free of hate speech, protested the campus provocation-tours of characters like Milo Yiannopoulos, and opposed the expenditure of their student fees on these tours. Notice that college students are not the government, and do not have the power of the state. Furthermore, most syllabi do not actually contain safe space guarantees, content warnings are given to assure the delivery of course content rather than to suppress it, and protesting politicians, taxes, and fees you disagree with is as American as French fries. All the wailing about the left censoring debate was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But by the end of the Trump administration, we were experiencing actual censorship, and it has been implemented at the hands of the right. Seven states have banned the teaching of “critical race theory,” or any school content that would cause boys or white students to "feel guilty," while 16 other states have bills proposing this ban still working their way through the legislative process. Six states currently have “Don’t Say Gay” laws governing public schools, and many states are considering similar policies in the name of protecting children from being "groomed" for sexual abuse. George Santos has positioned himself as in favor of all of these bans.

The right frames the left as hysterically cancelling people at the drop of a pin, including one another. In fact, most LGBTQ+ communities are tolerant of a lot of diversity of opinion, being quite diverse communities. But opposing protection for same-gender marriage, and framing teaching children that LGBTQ+ people exist as pro-pedophilia activity?

Those are the sorts of positions taken by a token talisman troll. Some may hope to reform Santos, and some will want to share zero space with him, but either way, these positions place Santos outside the LGBTQ+ community.

And that’s a good thing for the community, because the man is a lying manipulative narcissist grifting thief.