Hillbilly LGBT

I posted a version of this to Threads, where it got some traction, so I wanted to put it somewhere at least a little more permanent.

So some thoughts on JD Vance, misogyny, and closeted homosexuality.

I haven’t heard it talked about all that much, but there’s a weird passage in Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s memoir, where he says he thought he was gay when he was a kid, only to get talked out of it by his grandma. It’s presented as a way of saying it’s OK to be gay, but also as a way of saying Vance was definitely not gay:

I broached this issue with Mamaw, confessing that I was gay and I was worried that I would burn in hell. She said, “Don’t be a fucking idiot, how would you know that you’re gay?” I explained my thought process. Mamaw chuckled and seemed to consider how she might explain to a boy my age. Finally she asked, “J.D., do you want to suck dicks?” I was flabbergasted. Why would someone want to do that? She repeated herself, and I said, “Of course not!” “Then,” she said, “you’re not gay. And even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you.” That settled the matter. Apparently I didn’t have to worry about being gay anymore. Now that I’m older, I recognize the profundity of her sentiment: Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about Mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about.

Now, I haven’t read Hillbilly Elegy, so you’ll have to forgive me for not having more context, but this is weird on a lot of levels. It seems intended somehow to be pro-gay, or at least anti-anti-gay, but it’s a weird way to get there. And also, as evidence for not being gay, a nine-year-old (I think he was around nine here) not wanting to suck dick is pretty thin.

What does this have to do with Vance’s views on women? Maybe nothing. But let’s just, as a thought experiment, see how it all might look if we think of Vance as a closeted gay man: someone who is emotionally and sexually drawn to men, and not to women, and who very much wishes to deny this to himself and to others.

Because Vance’s misogyny is not the grabby, sexualizing misogyny of Donald Trump. It’s something very different.

Trump’s misogyny is gross but familiar. It’s Hooters, porn, titty bars, rap lyrics. Trump reduces women to their ornamental or functional sexuality, and he mocks women for being sexually unattractive. It’s relatable, too, for men who are attracted to women, because we all to some extent and in some contexts sexualize women. This can be healthy, like Biden saying his heart still races for his wife, Jill. He should be attracted to her. That’s lovely. What’s problematic with Trump isn’t the desire, but the lack of boundaries, as when he sexualizes his daughter or rapes a woman in a store or says he can grab women by the pussy, and the lack of respect for women’s full humanity outside of their sexual desirability.

Vance’s misogyny, though, is weirder. He never sexualizes women. Instead, he casts them as reproductive devices: they bear children, and when they can’t anymore, they should help raise children. Premenopausal women without children make him uncomfortable. Teachers without children disorient and disturb him. This is weird. What is it about?

If you’re a man who is supposed to be attracted to women, but you’re actually very not, then attractive, unattached women can be terrifying. What if they want you? What if you’re supposed to perform wanting them? “Disorienting” and “disturbing” starts to make a kind of sense. They literally disrupt your orientation. Which is angering, humiliating, upsetting, dangerous. You want control, and you want revenge. And none of this is conscious, which makes the crazy harder to manage or contain.

Vance turns this disorientation into ideology: if they’re not sexually attractive, and if their sexuality is threatening, but if heterosexuality is nevertheless absolutely required, then what is it for? Procreation. Women are there to make babies, raise babies, and otherwise keep their distance. When they exist as autonomous, sexual beings who haven’t yet had some man’s children, they’re a threat.

Now, Vance is married. He has kids. But he speaks weirdly about it, calls them his wife’s kids. And it’s worth considering that his wife comes from a culture of arranged, often transactional marriages, where a hot-and-heavy romantic relationship is not considered a necessary or normal stage of courtship, and that their relationship was sort of arranged by their mentor Amy Chua at Yale. This would’ve been ideal for a gay man needing a wife, and perhaps for an ambitious but bookish Indian-American woman needing a husband who was going places and wouldn’t demand too much.

Is this all a lot of conjecture? Absolutely. But it maybe gets at the offness of Vance’s views on women, the weirdness that’s so unlike Trump’s all-too-familiar gropey sexualizing. And it maybe helps to contextualize the offness of so much of his persona: the hillbilly drag, the odd sense that there’s no core. If we see him as a man in deep denial of who he really is, perhaps it all makes a little more sense.

It even helps to put the whole couchfucker thing into perspective. We all knew that was a gag and not really true, but it caught fire because there was something plausible about it — something about Vance’s presentation of heterosexuality that seemed off.

No one makes similar jokes about Trump. With Trump, we know he fucks women, and the main joke is that he’s not very good at it, but even that doesn’t really land, because no one imagines that pleasuring the woman is ever the point for him. With sex, as with all things, pleasuring Trump is the only point.

It’s also notable that this is the second time Trump has picked a running mate with a peculiar sexual persona. The last guy, you’ll recall, calls his wife “Mother” and can’t be alone in a room with another woman. Like Vance, he seems to see women’s autonomous sexuality as threatening. For Trump, this may be ideal because it’s never in competition with him. Any sexual energy in the room must flow to Trump and no one else. If the guy next to you is frantically waving away any possible vibing, that’s perfect.

Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Vance’s name changes as evidence of his shifting persona. This was incorrect, as the name changes came early in life for reasons unrelated to the issues discussed in this article.