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Across Europe, gay voters are moving rightwards. Britain has not quite caught up yet, but it will. The only question is whether the Conservatives or Reform UK will be the ones to benefit.
I was reminded of this recently, while hosting a fundraiser for LGBT+ Conservatives at the Savile Club in London. Conservative MP Katie Lam was speaking, and she made a remark that would once have been uncontroversial, but now feels borderline taboo. LGBT rights, including same-sex marriage, she argued, are the product of particular cultures. Britain and the West built the legal and cultural framework that made LGBT equality possible. It did not happen by accident.
Around the same time, a video from France went viral. It shows a young, very camp man, wearing make-up and sporting truly impressive eyebrows, being approached by a Muslim influencer who offers him cash to say ‘salam aleykoum’ – or ‘peace be upon you’ – on camera. The young man recoils and snaps back: ‘No. We’re in France here.’ It showed a refusal to play along. An assertion of cultural confidence. No apology offered.
His reaction felt like part of a trend that’s been building for some time in France. Last year, Nicolas Scheffer of Têtu – France’s biggest LGBT magazine – reported that of all the parties represented in the National Assembly, it was the hard-right National Rally that sent the largest number of openly gay MPs to parliament in 2022. By cross-referencing public sources, between 20 and 25 of National Rally’s 89 MPs are believed to be gay.
Spain offers an even more explicit example. Natalie Donback, a reporter at Coda, describes the rise of Carlitos de España – a gay YouTuber originally from Bolivia and now based in Barcelona’s Eixample district. ‘Islam keeps me up at night’, he says. ‘They want me dead.’ Along with other influencers, Carlitos helped form Las Marifachas, a deliberately provocative group whose name fuses a slur for gay men with a slur for fascists. Alongside InfoVlogger, a YouTuber, and Madame in Spain, a drag queen from Alicante, they have built a bridge between parts of Spain’s LGBT community and the radical-right Vox party. Their content is not polite. It is not sanitised. Yet it expresses real fears.
Germany offers perhaps the sharpest data point of all. The leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian woman in a long-term civil partnership with a Sri Lankan – a fact that causes some progressives to short-circuit. A poll of over 60,000 users of gay-dating app Romeo found the AfD to be the most popular party among respondents, with nearly 28 per cent support. The Greens followed on around 20 per cent. The centre-left SPD trailed on just 12.5 per cent. The gay vote, if there is such a thing, is clearly not wedded to the kinds of left-wing parties that we might once have expected it to be.
This trend has acquired a name: homonationalism. Progressive politics has spent years insisting that all cultures are equal, that borders barely matter, and that any concern about immigration is morally suspect. In doing so, it has refused to confront a basic reality. Attitudes to homosexuality vary dramatically across the world, and large numbers of migrants to Europe come from countries that remain deeply hostile to gay people.
Britain’s gay community knows this better than most. In 2020, three gay men, James Furlong, David Wails and Joe Ritchie-Bennett, were murdered in Reading, in what prosecutors described as an act of religious jihad by Libyan refugee Khairi Saadallah. The killer was known to have made homophobic comments to friends and had said that gay people were not accepted in Libya.
Anecdotally, it is clear that the traditional alliance between the gay community and parties in favour of mass immigration is beginning to crumble. Among my own gay friends, more and more are now openly right-wing. Some say, quite casually, that they support Reform. A decade ago that would have caused a scene. Now it barely causes a pause in conversation.
Which brings us to Britain. When homonationalism takes root here, who benefits?
The Conservative Party should, in theory, be well placed. It boasts a powerful LGBT wing, led by rising star Luke Robert Black, and a cadre of openly gay MPs. Unlike the left, it is capable of articulating the risks posed by mass migration from societies where gay rights do not exist. It also legalised same-sex marriage when it was last in office.
Reform, by contrast, has no obvious LGBT wing at all. But it offers something far more valuable in the current moment: clarity. On borders, sovereignty and national identity, Reform speaks plainly, without embarrassment and without apology. For gay voters who believe cultural cohesion underpins personal freedom, that kind of clarity is hard to ignore. I hear that some of the most popular figures at Reform’s party conferences have been gay icons in the right-wing media, alongside Reform’s own chairman, former TV medic David Bull.
The risk for the Conservatives is complacency. Assuming right-leaning gay voters are banked because of past achievements is a mistake. Homonationalism is not about nostalgia, or gratitude for same-sex marriage. It is about the present, and about a growing sense that polite society is unwilling to defend the conditions that made LGBT freedom possible in the first place.
https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/the-tyranny-of-starmers-labour/
Make no mistake, homonationalism is coming to Britain. The question is not if or when, but which party of the right stands to gain from it.
Across Europe, gay voters are moving rightwards. Britain has not quite caught up yet, but it will. The only question is whether the Conservatives or Reform UK will be the ones to benefit.
I was reminded of this recently, while hosting a fundraiser for LGBT+ Conservatives at the Savile Club in London. Conservative MP Katie Lam was speaking, and she made a remark that would once have been uncontroversial, but now feels borderline taboo. LGBT rights, including same-sex marriage, she argued, are the product of particular cultures. Britain and the West built the legal and cultural framework that made LGBT equality possible. It did not happen by accident.
Around the same time, a video from France went viral. It shows a young, very camp man, wearing make-up and sporting truly impressive eyebrows, being approached by a Muslim influencer who offers him cash to say ‘salam aleykoum’ – or ‘peace be upon you’ – on camera. The young man recoils and snaps back: ‘No. We’re in France here.’ It showed a refusal to play along. An assertion of cultural confidence. No apology offered.
His reaction felt like part of a trend that’s been building for some time in France. Last year, Nicolas Scheffer of Têtu – France’s biggest LGBT magazine – reported that of all the parties represented in the National Assembly, it was the hard-right National Rally that sent the largest number of openly gay MPs to parliament in 2022. By cross-referencing public sources, between 20 and 25 of National Rally’s 89 MPs are believed to be gay.
Spain offers an even more explicit example. Natalie Donback, a reporter at Coda, describes the rise of Carlitos de España – a gay YouTuber originally from Bolivia and now based in Barcelona’s Eixample district. ‘Islam keeps me up at night’, he says. ‘They want me dead.’ Along with other influencers, Carlitos helped form Las Marifachas, a deliberately provocative group whose name fuses a slur for gay men with a slur for fascists. Alongside InfoVlogger, a YouTuber, and Madame in Spain, a drag queen from Alicante, they have built a bridge between parts of Spain’s LGBT community and the radical-right Vox party. Their content is not polite. It is not sanitised. Yet it expresses real fears.
Germany offers perhaps the sharpest data point of all. The leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian woman in a long-term civil partnership with a Sri Lankan – a fact that causes some progressives to short-circuit. A poll of over 60,000 users of gay-dating app Romeo found the AfD to be the most popular party among respondents, with nearly 28 per cent support. The Greens followed on around 20 per cent. The centre-left SPD trailed on just 12.5 per cent. The gay vote, if there is such a thing, is clearly not wedded to the kinds of left-wing parties that we might once have expected it to be.
This trend has acquired a name: homonationalism. Progressive politics has spent years insisting that all cultures are equal, that borders barely matter, and that any concern about immigration is morally suspect. In doing so, it has refused to confront a basic reality. Attitudes to homosexuality vary dramatically across the world, and large numbers of migrants to Europe come from countries that remain deeply hostile to gay people.
Britain’s gay community knows this better than most. In 2020, three gay men, James Furlong, David Wails and Joe Ritchie-Bennett, were murdered in Reading, in what prosecutors described as an act of religious jihad by Libyan refugee Khairi Saadallah. The killer was known to have made homophobic comments to friends and had said that gay people were not accepted in Libya.
Anecdotally, it is clear that the traditional alliance between the gay community and parties in favour of mass immigration is beginning to crumble. Among my own gay friends, more and more are now openly right-wing. Some say, quite casually, that they support Reform. A decade ago that would have caused a scene. Now it barely causes a pause in conversation.
Which brings us to Britain. When homonationalism takes root here, who benefits?
The Conservative Party should, in theory, be well placed. It boasts a powerful LGBT wing, led by rising star Luke Robert Black, and a cadre of openly gay MPs. Unlike the left, it is capable of articulating the risks posed by mass migration from societies where gay rights do not exist. It also legalised same-sex marriage when it was last in office.
Reform, by contrast, has no obvious LGBT wing at all. But it offers something far more valuable in the current moment: clarity. On borders, sovereignty and national identity, Reform speaks plainly, without embarrassment and without apology. For gay voters who believe cultural cohesion underpins personal freedom, that kind of clarity is hard to ignore. I hear that some of the most popular figures at Reform’s party conferences have been gay icons in the right-wing media, alongside Reform’s own chairman, former TV medic David Bull.
The risk for the Conservatives is complacency. Assuming right-leaning gay voters are banked because of past achievements is a mistake. Homonationalism is not about nostalgia, or gratitude for same-sex marriage. It is about the present, and about a growing sense that polite society is unwilling to defend the conditions that made LGBT freedom possible in the first place.
https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/the-tyranny-of-starmers-labour/
Make no mistake, homonationalism is coming to Britain. The question is not if or when, but which party of the right stands to gain from it.
