The Complicated Legacy of Lindsey Graham
https://slate.com/life/2026/07/lindsey-graham-death-trump-gay-married.html
The Complicated Legacy of Lindsey Graham
The most anti-LGBTQ voices are usually quite different behind closed doors.
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On the gay internet, the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham was met with a smirk. Memes and posts suggested that the longtime South Carolina lawmaker, who unexpectedly died on Saturday, was gazing on a Provincetown cruising spot from the afterlife, flamboyantly courting Ronald Reagan’s attention in hell, and being honored at Grindr headquarters with a flag flown at half-staff.
Though Graham maintained throughout his life that he was not gay, his sexuality was an open question in Washington. It’s not just that he had what some deemed an effeminate air and was never romantically linked with a woman, though that certainly fed the rumors. There were also multiple public accounts from men who said Graham had paid them for sex, claims he also denied. Still, nothing ever erupted into a full-blown scandal. And until his death, Graham remained a staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ rights.
This apparent hypocrisy made Graham a ripe subject of debate on the ethics of outing anti-gay public figures. One line of thinking holds that everyone has a right to sexual privacy so long as all participants are adult and consenting. Others believe that political officials who enjoy a private gay life while working to enshrine LGBTQ+ people as second-class citizens deserve no privilege of discretion. Graham’s alleged homosexuality was wielded as a weapon by both Republican opponents and left-leaning critics, leading some queer people to argue that invoking his sexuality in an insult amounted to outright homophobia.
But as LGBTQ+ advocates have grown less compromising and more confrontational in service of their cause, the pro-outing position has largely won out in popular discourse. For Graham—a supposedly closeted politician whose sexuality never became a major story—this situation was one of the last of its kind, a holdover from an era when being gay was a political death sentence and it was still common for public figures to deny it for life.
The buzz about Graham’s sexuality simmered for years before boiling over in 2020, when gay porn star Sean Harding tweeted, of a Republican senator with the initials L.G., “Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man.” The nickname supposedly given to Graham by the sex workers he had employed, “Lady G,” began making its way around social media. A couple of days later, another man wrote on Medium that Graham had hired him for a tryst at a Baltimore hotel, which led to a memorable anecdote about the clusters of moles Graham allegedly called his “ladybugs.” Upon his death, another person came forward with a tale of gay sex with Graham: trans author Jesse James Rose, who wrote on Instagram that Graham had paid her a “fat stack of cash” while she was a “twinky pre-transition college student” to perform sex acts on him while he wore red lingerie. She didn’t know he was a senator, she wrote, until other sex workers outed Lady G on social media.
The 2020 allegations bobbed around for a bit, but they never led to a major exposé or any further corroboration, likely because there was never any proof beyond the testimony of sex workers, who were apt to be met with distrust. And while Graham would occasionally bat down the rumors, sometimes with a joke, he seemed wholly unbothered by the accusations. Same with his fellow conservatives, who defended him by calling his critics homophobic when they hinted at his sexuality. Maybe it never blew up because Graham and his colleagues didn’t make a big thing of it, because Graham always denied it, or because there was no scorned wife for whom to feign empathy. Or perhaps it was because Graham was never a foaming-at-the-mouth bigot, never the loudest voice against marriage equality or nondiscrimination protections, even as he toed the GOP party line on LGBTQ+ issues at every opportunity.
It’s hard to imagine a gay Republican rising through the ranks today with the Graham playbook. There is less reason to hide now that openly gay men are all over the GOP, and it’s much harder to keep a private life private when you came of age in the camera-phone era. But Graham’s life still offers an important lesson about the nature of right-wing politics.
It’s expected, at this point, that family-values leaders will cheat on their wives, encourage their girlfriends to have abortions, indulge in the pleasures of cross-dressing, sexually harass their staffers, and solicit men for gay sex. With a few possible exceptions (if a Mitt Romney sexting scandal breaks, I’ll eat my iPhone), the sexual morals espoused by conservatives are a whole lot of posturing that readily subsides when personal interest strikes.
A punitive stance on nonnormative sexuality is useful for the GOP insofar as the party can use it to rile up its anti-LGBTQ+ base. But so long as gay and transgender Republicans are loyal soldiers who don’t threaten the gender hierarchies the right is invested in upholding, they pose no danger to the right-wing project. They can even help legitimize it, as when Caitlyn Jenner advocated against trans girls in school sports. If Graham was gay, it was isolated to the arena of sex practices, rather than the weightier realms of identity and politics in which queer activism lies.
In life and in death, gay commentators have portrayed Graham’s reportedly closeted life as sad and lonely. But I doubt he felt much regret, shame, or sadness about his choices. Like many of his Republican peers in the Trump era, he had stated values that swayed this way and that with the shifting tides of power. Graham appears to have been far more motivated by his own capacity for political influence—and by seeking displays of dominance through unrelenting hawkishness—than by personal integrity or any solid sense of self. He might not have even thought himself to be gay in the sense of a sexual or romantic identity, as opposed to a man who craves gay sex. For Graham, alleged secret paid sex and a direct line to the president might have been a dream come true.
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