My dad listened to Rush Limbaugh attack gay people like me, and echoed his contempt – USA TODAY
My father started listening to Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, about the time he retired as a scientist, while living in Cincinnati. I lived in Washington, D.C., working as a field organizer for national organizations that supported civil rights and sought to count and punish hate crimes against what we then called the gay community.
By coincidence, Cincinnati was a hot spot for efforts by religious conservative organizations to stop the movement for legal protections from discrimination for LGBT people and attacks fueled by bigotry, including hate crimes, against us. I had come out to my parents about four years earlier. I was selective in describing the risks or threats I experienced, including a taxi that once started to drive off with my then-boyfriend’s hand on the handle.
I was also deeply involved in the 1993 campaign in Cincinnati against a measure, Issue 3, to amend the city charter to forbid any law that grants “minority or protected status … or other preferential treatment” to gay men, lesbians or bisexuals. The measure, the focus of a divisive campaign filled with harsh invective over race and sexuality, passed with 62% voter support. My parents happened to move to the city the following year, as courts and the community dealt with fallout from the charter amendment.
Dad’s daily rendezvous with Limbaugh
My mother professed concern for my safety, though it wasn’t clear whom she held responsible for threats to her son. Was it unnamed, imagined bullies who might target me on a sidewalk or in a gas station or parking lot and lash out with homophobic violence? Or was it me, for defying notions of religious piety and conformity she held dear and being unafraid to call myself a gay man?
At the time, fear of AIDS and transmission of deadly HIV was interwoven with gay identity, like the double helix of DNA that researchers were then untangling. For people like my mom, this stigma clouded the impulse toward compassion. It raised for her an uncomfortable question she once or twice put into words: Was I bringing hostility on myself?
My father was a different story, with justifications more blunt and biting for his disapproval. In 1995, Cincinnati city council members were deciding whether or not to repeal the city’s hate-crime ordinance that the new charter amendment appeared to disqualify. I was visiting them and decided to ask my dad how he would have voted on Issue 3 had he arrived in the city just a short time earlier.
He never answered directly. But the language he used — “I don’t want a gay agenda forced on me” — made clear his contempt. I challenged him about where the use of force was actually coming from, citing statistics that showed harassment and violence against LGBT people was a rampant danger and worsening in some states. I also challenged him about where he got his information. Again, I did not get a direct answer. Circling back to my mom, I found a likely source: His daily rendezvous with talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
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Scathing criticism of “homosexuals” was Limbaugh’s consistent textual preference for on-air treatment of LGBT people. He mocked gay men who died of AIDS. He promoted the false narrative that gay men recruit children for sex, telling Playboy, “I do think that if you get hold of people young enough and attempt to sway them, that homosexuality can be steered into them.”
This is what my dad imbibed on a regular basis. Limbaugh’s attempt at reversal of victimhood — that it was heterosexual people, not gays, who were the subjects of repression because their authority to lash out at people they despised was limited by law— could be read in the language of the Cincinnati policy itself. Limbaugh repeated the false accusation used to win passage of the law: that by trying to stop discrimination, gay people sought privilege, or “special rights.”
Painful questions for my parents
In one of Limbaugh’s most dangerous turns, he questioned whether Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man whose assailants went to jail for his killing, was the victim of a hate crime. Shepard’s murder in Wyoming in October 1998 garnered the attention of the country.
It was this strand of Limbaugh’s anti-LGBT attacks — blending hate and disinformation — that prompted me to ask my dad about his allegiance to Limbaugh in personal terms.
I wanted to know how far he would go in believing Limbaugh’s distortion. “He is saying gay people like me deserve violence. And you support him. So, when is it too late to turn back?” I asked. “Is it when your son, when a member of your own family, suffers harm at the hands of a hateful person?” I could not allow my mom or dad to look away from the possibility that an attacker might take an added sense of permission from a purveyor of ignorance and cruelty, aired to millions of Americans daily by a network of radio stations, who reinforced devaluation of lives like mine.
I do not remember getting a direct answer to my question from my dad. But in the ensuing years, he did struggle to make amends and to show he loved me.
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Progress has come incrementally. In 2001, my mother volunteered alongside me to defeat a charter amendment similar to Cincinnati’s in my hometown of Kalamazoo, where she and my dad had moved back. In 2004, Cincinnati voters repealed Issue 3. In 2009, the federal bill to punish anti-LGBT hate crimes,named in part for Shepard, finally became law.
Today, my parents are going strong, thanks in large part to the care of my sister — who did not let them buy into Limbaugh’s falsehoods that “the coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Well into their eighties, they welcome my partner fully as part of the family. Whenever I call them by phone, my dad or mom turns off or puts on mute their preferred Fox News. Rush Limbaugh no longer echoes in our relationship. But his legacy has shaped it, while also inadvertently instilling in many LGBT people throughout America a remarkable form of resilience.
Hans Johnson is a longtime columnist on LGBTQ rights and an advocate on state and federal policy, advising or assisting ballot measure campaigns in more than 25 states. He lives in Los Angeles.
