The press office of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, which has embraced a social media style that mimics President Trump’s pugnacious tone, has recently taken to needling conservative critics with posts that suggest they are gay or effeminate.
When the conservative commentator Benny Johnson posted a clip on X last week in which he discussed allegations of fraud in California, Mr. Newsom’s press office responded by suggesting that Mr. Johnson’s team uses the popular gay dating app Grindr. “We got a call from Grindr after this and said your team was their biggest users,” it posted on X.
This week the office shared a TMZ report showing pictures of Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, in Disney World as the Department of Homeland Security remained shut down. “Divas still need vacation,” the governor’s press office wrote.
And earlier this year, when Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, got into a long and involved skirmish with Scott Bessent, the first openly gay Treasury secretary, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, his press office posted: “Scott Bessent flew across the ocean to star in The Real Housewives of Davos — and can’t stop talking about how ‘hot’ he thinks @CAGovernor ‘Davos’ Daddy’ Newsom is.”
Mr. Newsom’s posts are dividing his allies. Some people are likening them to schoolyard homophobic insults and said he should do better (or drop them).
“He should not have said that,” said former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who came out in 1987 and was for decades the most prominent openly gay politician in the country. “It uses sexual orientation as an accusation, which is wrong.”
Them, an L.G.B.T.Q.+ publication, wrote that Mr. Newsom’s account had been “posting sentiments that are, frankly, homophobic.”
Mr. Newsom, one of America’s most prominent Democrats and a potential 2028 presidential candidate, ascended in politics as one of the most gay-friendly elected officials in the nation. As mayor of San Francisco, he directed the city clerk in 2004 to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, a first in California.
The posts were meant to bait the right, his aides said, and were written by gay staff members. A spokesman for the governor, Izzy Gardon, said in a statement that the posts were aimed at “exposing the putrid behavior from the right wing through ridicule and mocking.”
“You can choose to find offense from what we are doing or you can see it for what it really is: holding up a mirror to the hypocrisy and derangement of trolls like Benny Johnson, who lives his life soaked in fake outrage,” Mr. Gardon said. “We are not engaging in the same behavior as this fool and his ilk — we are mocking their hypocrisy and continued degradation of society, holding a mirror up to what others ignore or dismiss as merely juvenile.”
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Mr. Johnson responded to another of the governor’s press office’s posts by saying on X that he had never cheated on his wife, and noted that Mr. Newsom had publicly acknowledged that he had an affair two decades ago while he was in the throes of a divorce.
Jane Natoli, a member of the board of Equality California, a leading L.G.B.T.Q. rights organization, said that every time the governor’s office sent a new post in this vein, she and others at the organization would text it to each other with eye roll emojis. She said she does not think Mr. Newsom should revert to “cheap homophobia jokes.”
She said it bothered her when the governor’s office responded to public criticisms by saying “you don’t get the joke” or “you don’t have a sense of humor.”
Some prominent gay rights groups that have criticized online behavior as homophobic in the past have stayed silent, perhaps because they view Mr. Newsom as an ally.
A few Republicans and allies of Mr. Trump have denounced the posts as homophobic.
“It’s so odd to see the former mayor of the most gay-friendly city in America, San Francisco, use homosexuality as a slur,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a strident Trump supporter who is U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, wrote on social media last week. “Weird!”
Mondaire Jones, a former representative who in 2020 became one of the first openly gay Black men elected to Congress, said he did not take issue with the posts. “I don’t think Gavin Newsom is homophobic,” Mr. Jones said, laughing. He noted that the governor had been “at the forefront” of securing rights for gay Americans.
Some of the Republican criticisms of the posts have been complicated by the party’s own habit of suggesting that Democratic opponents are gay.
On Saturday, the Republican Party’s official X account responded to “No Kings” protests by posting an image of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2024, waving and smiling broadly, his arm swinging above his head.
“No Queens,” the post said, referring to Mr. Walz, who has a wife and two children.
Mr. Newsom’s press office responded, “Why is MAGA homophobic???”
Heather Knight contributed reporting from San Francisco.
The post Newsom’s New Attack on Political Enemies: You’re Gay appeared first on New York Times.
