Photo by Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

It’s well-established that JD Vance’s views on matters such as gender and sexuality aren’t just regressive–they’re very, very weird.

The 39-year-old Ohio senator has railed against “childless cat ladies” and said people without kids should have less voting power than parents.

Much like the quick-footed Josh Hawley, Vance is preoccupied with masculinity, despite his own seeming deviations from the trope. Is that eyeliner, we see? 🤔

With a staunch anti-LGBTQ+ voting record, Vance is one of many conservative politicians with a repugnant history of remarks about queer people.

He’s called gay people “groomers” and opposes gender-affirming care for minors, equating the medically approved practice with “mutilation.” He even went so far as to

I don’t mind that JD Vance chooses to wear eyeliner.

I have male friends who do drag. It’s fine.

I mind that his kind think it’s evil for men to wear makeup and calls them groomer child rapists if they do.

It’s the judgmental hypocrisy that upsets me. pic.twitter.com/vU4i5Zn0Mi

— Tyler 🏳️‍🌈🥥🌴 (@Tyler_The_Wise) July 30, 2024 “>introduce a bill in the Senate that would’ve made providing gender-affirming care for minors a felony nationwide.

But there are a couple of factors that make Vance different. The first one is, he used to be moderate, and turned his back on at least one queer friend.

His former Yale classmates, Sofia Nelson, who identifies as transgender, recently shared email exchanges with Vance to the New York Times. In them, Vance expresses support for LGBTQ+ people, and apologizes for mislabeling Nelson as a “lesbian” in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. (After attending Pride Day in San Francisco in 2015, he remarked it was “nice seeing so many happy people.”)

Vance and Nelson’s friendship ended in 2021, when he expressed support for an Arkansas law that would’ve banned gender-affirming care for minors.

In short, like his running mate, the guy’s a fraud. But to repeat, he’s also quite strange! His newfound staunch conservatism stems from relationships with bizarre people, such as gay tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who is one of his biggest bankrollers.

Thiel himself has expressed a number of misogynistic views in the past, including an essay in which he expresses skepticism about women’s suffrage.

Vance is also tied to the Claremont Institute, a Californian hub for far-right ideologues. One of their fellows, a Manosphere figure named Jack Murphy, once said that “feminists need rape.” Vance did a joint interview in 2021 with Murphy.

If a person can be judged by the company they keep, then Vance is now a far cry from the Yale graduate and Pride attendee he used to be. But even his earlier writing contains some, ahem, unusual lines about masculinity, femininity and topics of sexual nature.

Here are just seven of his strangest statements on such matters he’s made…

“I’ll never forget the time that I convinced myself I’m gay“

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance recounts how he once convinced himself he was gay. While that’s perfectly common, his reasoning is a bit… unique.

“I was eight or nine, maybe younger, and I stumbled upon a broadcast by some fire-and-brimstone preacher. The man spoke about the evils of homosexuals, how they had infiltrated our society, and how they were all destined for hell absent some serious repenting,” he wrote.

At the time, the only thing I knew about gay men was that they preferred men to women. This described me perfectly: I disliked girls, and my best friend in the world was my buddy Bill. Oh no, I’m going to hell.”

As somebody on X pointed out, it’s fair to say Vance probably still prefers men to women. Also, go grandma? Sadly, it seems like the family’s cool gene skipped a couple of generations.

His “masculine diary”

Like many millennials who came of age in the 2010s, Vance was a blogger! He launched his first blog before his 2005 deployment to Iraq, “The Ruminations of JD Hamel” (his surname at the time).

In his first entry, Vance was quick to declare that his blog was manly. He would write down feelings, but “not silly little girly feelings.” He concluded that his blog was “like a dairy… only far more masculine.” (Years later, Vance’s buddy Hawley followed up with his own book entirely about masculinity. Hive minds, these two…)

Feeling “like a female”

When Vance was deployed to Iraq in 2005, he wasn’t very happy about it. Like many young people, he was apprehensive about leaving home.

And apparently that made him… feel like a female. That’s some weird internal dialogue.

“Yesterday was incredibly emotional for me. I honestly can say that I felt more like a female than I think I ever have or will,” he wrote.

Can’t watch Garden State because it was just too emotional

In case you couldn’t tell, Vance’s old blogs are goldmines. In the same entry about leaving home, Vance bemoans how he can’t watch his favorite romcom, Garden State, because he misses home. (The story is about a 26-year-old actor who returns home to New Jersey to find his mother is dead… and meets the love of his life.)

“I couldn’t watch Garden State because New Jersey’s landscape is so much like Ohio’s, the music is so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc. made me want to tear up,” he writes.

On one hand, Vance’s tender blog entries about leaving home are relatable and endearing. Who among us can’t relate to music conjuring up certain memories, and bringing us to tears?

But on the other hand, it’s funny to think of the MAGA-pilled version of Vance getting all dramatic about romcoms and landscapes. He’s a man with a family!

Getting divorced is like changing one’s underwear

It’s apparent that Vance’s experiences as a child have shaped his views on family. One of the themes of Hillbilly Elegy is Vance’s constant yearning for a true father figure, as his alcohol-addled mother brought a rotating cast of damaged and/or abusive men into their lives.

Instead of Vance’s experiences making him empathetic, his view of the family veers into chauvinism. During a 2021 speech, he decries the concept of divorce, advocating for parents to stay in abusive relationships.

Oh, and he blames sex for the rise in divorce rates. Of course…

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,'” he said.

Childless people are worthless sociopaths

By now, we know about Vance’s views on “childless cat ladies”… which he calls Pete Buttigieg, who has two kids with his husband, Chasten.

But recently unearthed video shows Vance going even further. He says childless people are “sociopathic” and “deranged.”

So normal!

Bathroom, please!

Vance is a proud member of the bathroom police, obsessed over where adults choose to relieve themselves in public. But his fixation is so extreme, it’s affected U.S. foreign policy.

The Washington Post reports Vance froze dozens of ambassador nominations over LGBTQ+ views, including a question about gender-neutral bathrooms.

Most senators are concerned with diplomats’ foreign policy experience. But Vance? He’s worried about urinals.

Okie dokie… definitely not weird at all.

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