Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Grindr will host its first official White House Correspondents’ Association dinner weekend party on April 24, the LGBTQ dating app confirmed this week, formalizing what company officials described as a “longstanding relationship with the federal workforce.” The event, to be held in Georgetown the night before the main gala, will “bring together policymakers, journalists, and LGBTQ community leaders as we toast the First Amendment,” according to the invitation.
Just a monument, no other reason to post it. (sainaniritu/depositphotos)
Joe Hack, Grindr’s head of global government affairs, a title the company insists is not a joke, said the move reflected the app’s growing Washington portfolio. “Grindr represents a global community with real stakes in Washington. HIV funding, privacy, online safety, LGBTQ+ family rights — these are daily life for our community,” Hack said. He added that “nobody does connections like Grindr,” a claim the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee appeared to support when Grindr usage surged 166 percent and more than a thousand users reported the app briefly buckling under the load. CEO George Arison later clarified that the servers had not crashed, but had merely “gotten to know themselves better.”
The Milwaukee spike was not Grindr’s first rodeo, nor its second. Cleveland logged a 66 percent jump during the 2016 RNC. CPAC attendees in suburban Washington produced a smaller but measurable bump in 2023. A local outage was reported during CPAC in Grapevine, Texas. Phoenix reported elevated Grindr activity during Turning Point USA’s summit, and again, according to downtime trackers, during the memorial service for activist Charlie Kirk. Grindr has declined to comment on individual events, citing user privacy and, as one employee put it, “trying not to ruin Thanksgiving for half of Congress.”
Historical context suggests the timing is overdue:
Former Ohio Republican state Rep. Wes Goodman, who campaigned on “natural marriage,” resigned in 2017 after being caught having sex with a man in his statehouse office, a room previously reserved for constituent services in the more traditional sense.
Randy Boehning, hypocrite. (Wikimedia Commons)
North Dakota state Rep. Randy Boehning voted against a bill protecting LGBT residents from discrimination and then, in what colleagues described as a richly ironic news cycle, was revealed to have sent unsolicited photographs of his genitals to a man on Grindr.
Former Puerto Rico Senator Roberto Arango resigned after nude selfies surfaced on the same app.
George Santos, who was expelled from the House of Representatives for reasons too numerous to list here, publicly dubbed the 2024 RNC “the Grindr Super Bowl” and encouraged attendees to “just come out of the closet, boys. Come on, it’s fun.”
Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who had spent his career voting against every piece of gay rights legislation that crossed his desk, was arrested in a men’s room at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport in 2007, after a police officer in the next stall reported that Craig had signaled him with a “wide stance” and a foot tap. Craig pleaded guilty, then tried to un-plead guilty, then insisted he was not gay in a press conference that has since been taught in communications courses as an example of what not to do.
Florida Congressman Mark Foley chaired the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and resigned in 2006 after it emerged that he had been sending sexually explicit instant messages to teenage male House pages, at least one of whom he asked to measure himself.
Virginia Congressman Ed Schrock, a reliable vote against “the radical homosexual agenda,” withdrew from his 2004 reelection campaign hours after a gay activist posted audio recordings of him allegedly using a men-seeking-men phone line to specify, in considerable detail, what he was looking for.
Florida state Rep. Bob Allen, co-chair of the state’s 2008 McCain campaign, was arrested in a Titusville park men’s room after offering an undercover officer twenty dollars to perform oral sex on him. Allen’s defense at trial was that the officer had looked intimidating and he had offered the money out of fear. The jury did not accept this.
Roy Ashburn, hypocrite. (UCLA Film & Television Archive/YouTube)
California state Sen. Roy Ashburn, who had voted against every gay rights bill brought before him, was arrested for drunk driving in 2010 after leaving a Sacramento gay nightclub with an unidentified male companion. Ashburn subsequently came out and explained that his voting record had reflected “the wishes of my constituents,” which is a sentence he said out loud.
George Rekers, co-founder of the Family Research Council and a professional expert witness against gay adoption, was photographed at Miami International Airport in 2010 returning from a ten-day European vacation with a twenty-year-old escort he had hired. Rekers initially explained that he had hired the young man to carry his luggage, a claim undermined by photographs in which Rekers was the one pushing the cart.
Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage who enjoyed White House access during the George W. Bush administration, resigned in 2006 after a Denver male escort named Mike Jones disclosed that Haggard had been paying him for sex and buying crystal methamphetamine for three years. Haggard later described himself as “a heterosexual with complications.”
Washington state Rep. Richard Curtis, who had voted against a domestic partnership bill and a bill banning employment discrimination against gay people, resigned in 2007 after being caught propositioning a man in an erotic video store. The man, a paid escort, later told police that Curtis had worn women’s lingerie and a red negligee during their encounter at a Spokane hotel. Curtis denied being gay.
Indiana state Rep. Phillip Hinkle, who voted for the state’s constitutional marriage amendment, responded to a Craigslist ad in 2011 from an eighteen-year-old offering “a really good time” and offered eighty dollars, “plus a healthy tip if real satisfied.” When the young man changed his mind at the hotel, Hinkle allegedly tried to give him an iPad to keep quiet. Hinkle insisted he was not gay.
Spokane Mayor Jim West, a former state senator who had proposed barring gay people from working in schools and daycare centers, was exposed in 2005 by the Spokesman-Review after reporters caught him offering a city internship to a man he believed he had met on Gay.com. West was recalled from office the following year.
Glenn Murphy Jr., the national chairman of the Young Republican Federation, resigned in 2007 after a fellow young Republican accused him of performing oral sex on him while he slept following a convention afterparty. Murphy pleaded guilty to criminal deviate conduct. He had, earlier that same year, denounced the Democratic Party as a “party of values” he could not respect.
Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2005 to 2007 and the architect of the party’s strategy of putting anti-gay-marriage amendments on state ballots in 2004 to drive evangelical turnout, came out as gay in 2010. Mehlman subsequently lobbied in support of marriage equality, which is what the machine shop calls “reversing the polarity.”
Maryland Congressman Bob Bauman, chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom and author of a “Family Protection Act” that would have stripped federal funds from any program suggesting homosexuality was acceptable, was arrested in 1980 for soliciting sex from a sixteen-year-old boy. He later wrote a memoir titled The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, which does not appear on most party reading lists.
Mississippi Congressman Jon Hinson, who had campaigned as a family-values candidate and won reelection in 1980 after acknowledging and then surviving a prior arrest for indecent exposure, resigned in 1981 after being arrested for attempted sodomy with a Library of Congress staffer in a House office building men’s room.
Aaron Shock, hypocrite. (Wikimedia)
Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock, who had voted against the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, came out as gay in 2020, six years after resigning from Congress over a separate scandal involving federal reimbursements for a Downton Abbey–themed office redecoration.
Roy Cohn, chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s Lavender Scare purges of gay federal employees, mentor to a young Donald Trump, and a man who spent his entire career prosecuting and publicly shaming gay Americans, died of complications from AIDS in 1986 while insisting to the press that he had liver cancer.
Terry Dolan, founder of the National Conservative Political Action Committee and a key strategist of the 1980s New Right who ran fundraising campaigns warning donors about the “homosexual menace,” died of AIDS in 1986. His brother, the conservative columnist Tony Dolan, initially denied the cause of death and then quietly stopped denying it.
Pennsylvania county commissioner Bruce Barclay, who had run as a family-values Republican, was charged with raping a man in his home in 2007. In the course of the investigation, police discovered that Barclay had been secretly recording dozens of his sexual encounters with men using cameras hidden throughout the house. The rape charges were eventually dropped. The videotapes were not.
Lonnie Latham, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee who had publicly urged gay people to renounce their “sinful, destructive lifestyle” and seek conversion therapy, was arrested in Oklahoma City in 2006 after offering to perform oral sex on an undercover police officer outside a hotel near the state capitol.
Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House in American history, presided over the chamber during the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act’s enforcement and repeatedly blocked gay rights legislation from reaching the floor. In 2016 he pleaded guilty to federal banking violations related to hush-money payments he had made to a former high school wrestler he had sexually abused decades earlier as a teacher and coach. The sentencing judge described him, in open court, as “a serial child molester.”
The Correspondents’ Association declined to comment on rumors that a joint cocktail reception had been proposed, then quietly shelved after the Secret Service asked Grindr to disable the grid function within a four-block radius of the Washington Hilton. A spokesperson for the app said discussions were ongoing and that the First Amendment would be celebrated as originally planned, “with or without a functional proximity filter.”
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