What happened to my camp???

When Donald Trump returned to the White House, a sizable slice of liberal gay America prepared for the worst. Social feeds filled with fever dreams of pink-triangle badges, forcibly dissolved marriages, and rainbow flags replaced by barbed wire. Rumors swirled that the new administration would yank wedding rings off same-sex couples and ship them to re-education camps stocked with conversion pamphlets and Bibles. The hysterics were loud, theatrical, and, as it turns out, entirely imaginary.

What actually happened? Nothing resembling that. Same-sex marriage remains the law of the land under the 2015 Obergefell decision. The Supreme Court, which includes three Trump appointees, recently declined to take up a challenge aimed at overturning it. No one was forcibly divorced. No camps appeared. Pride events continued, and the cultural machinery of the gay left largely kept humming, albeit with more complaints about the administration’s sharp turn against gender ideology.

Rather than purges, Trump put openly gay people in prominent roles. Richard Grenell served in high-profile posts during the first term. Scott Bessent became Treasury Secretary—the highest-ranking openly gay official in U.S. history—married with children, and reportedly the subject of light-hearted Trump jokes about breaking Melania’s friends’ hearts. Groups like the Log Cabin Republicans remained supportive, and a minority of gay men backed Trump for reasons that had little to do with sexuality: economy, borders, crime, and fatigue with identity politics.

The gap between the predicted apocalypse and the actual record says more about the predictors than the presidency. While activists and media outlets amplified every rumor of camps or forced divorces, the administration’s concrete moves centered on biological sex in sports, prisons, schools, and medicine—territory where a noticeable number of gay people quietly prefer common-sense distinctions over expansive gender claims. However, exit polls still showed the large majority of Gay & Lesbian voters choosing Democrats (around 86% for Harris in 2024), but the sky did not fall.

Ironically, the real disappointment seems to have landed in certain conservative gay circles, where the non-arrival of those mythical camps has been comedically mourned. Imagine the letdown: four years of all-expenses-paid lodging, zero income tax, and round-the-clock socializing with other gay men—most likely in Palm Springs, Wilton Manors, and Fire Island with poolside mimosas and 80’s Pride energy – No hard labor. Instead of a government-funded gay retreat under the guise of “re-education,” Gays got the same boring reality as everyone else: jobs, mortgages, rent, and car payments. The camps never materialized, and neither did the free sabbatical many predicted, and some braced for with secret excitement.

Two years in, the unrealized predictions of forced divorces and rainbow-flagged concentration camps are triggering left-wing fury. The camps were supposed to be the ultimate proof that Trump was basically Hitler with better hair—and when the camps failed to materialize, the marriages stayed perfectly legal, and nobody got shipped off to Palm Springs on the taxpayers’ dime, the whole “existential threat” branding campaign fell flat.

Groups like the Human Rights Campaign, long masters of the grift, had already built an entire fundraising empire on the promise of imminent rainbow gulags; the non-event left them scrambling to explain why the emergency donations should keep flowing without a single dramatic internment to point to. Instead of quietly updating their priors, activists and cable-news hosts treated the absence of persecution itself as an outrage, blaming “complacent” gays and anyone else who refused to keep the panic profitable. The anger isn’t really about missed oppression; it’s the bitter realization that four years of apocalyptic copy just got retired without delivering the crisis their donors were promised.

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