Know Your Enemy: The Gay Men Who Built the Conservative Movement

Know Your Enemy: The Gay Men Who Built the Conservative Movement

Matt and Sam are joined by Neil J. Young to discuss his new book, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

In this special Pride Month episode of Know Your Enemy, Matt and Sam talk to historian Neil J. Young about his new book, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right. His absorbing account begins after the Second World War, when neither party made for a good political home for gay people, which helped make a libertarian approach to sexual politics—getting the government out of their private lives—compelling, a feature that would mark the gay right for years to come. The conversation turns to some of the gay (often closeted) architects of the postwar conservative movement, the hopeful years between Stonewall and AIDS, Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the religious right, the growing partisan divide on LGBTQ rights, the very campy Trump years—and more!

Further Reading:

Neil J. Young, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (2024)

We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (2015)

Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (1996)

James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (2022)

Marvin Leibman, Coming Out Conservative: An Autobiography (1992)