The Closet’s Crystal Curtain
A satirical op-ed with receipts, metaphors, and a fuse you can light in public
I. The chandelier scene
Crystal light spills across a private D.C. club where cabinet officials trade glances over the string section. The dress code is “power with a smile.” At one end of the room, a policy memo moves like a shadow through the hands of staffers. It outlines cuts, restrictions, and a new standard of “biological truth.” The drag performers who used to work these rooms are off the invite list. The door staff do not say why.
The room contains a contradiction polished to a mirror shine. It is stocked with what the Style pages recently christened the administration’s A-Gays—close-crop hair, windowpane suits, and a studied allergy to the word “queer.” They are openly gay, culturally fluent, and perfectly at ease in a government that is busy redrafting the terms of gender and public life. Their presence is the chandelier: dazzling, distracting, and heavy enough to crush you if it falls. Spokesman-Review
II. Representation as lacquer
Let us be clear about the stakes. In January 2025, the White House issued Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the blueprint for an administrative purge of gender-affirming policies and data collection inside the state. OPM’s follow-on memo tells agencies how to enforce it, right down to workplace rules and paperwork. This is power, executed in the dry grammar of governance. It is also a political liturgy: sex is binary, identity is suspect, and compliance is patriotic. The White House
Weeks later, HHS upped the ante: states have 60 days to strip “gender ideology” from PREP-funded sex-ed or lose money. California was already flagged. The figure is over $81 million across 46 states and territories—policy as leverage, funding as the cudgel. The chandelier glows. The floor shifts. Axios
Now pan the camera to the photo ops. There stands Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary—openly gay, Senate-confirmed, fifth in the line of succession, and thus the highest-ranking openly LGBTQ official in U.S. history. His husband and children sat behind him at the hearing. The symbolism is real. So are the orders crossing his building’s transom. Representation is lacquer. Power is the wood beneath it. 90.5 WESA
III. Camp, inverted
Camp, properly understood, is rebellion by exaggeration. It is the hot glue gun of truth: adorn power until it looks absurd. But what happens when camp is captured? When the Village People soundtrack is the administration’s wink while trans troops get read out of service members’ manuals; when gala selfies are posted the week an agency memo instructs the bureaucracy to erase the very language that describes your friends’ lives?
You get camp as counterfeit—all the sequins of subversion deployed as décor for reaction. Meanwhile, the state is busy with the boring violence: reinstating barriers to transgender military service; revising health regulations to narrow nondiscrimination protections for gender identity; and re-wiring the federal data spine so SOGI fields stop populating. These are not vibes. They are code paths. Reuters, KFF
IV. “He loves the gays,” and other useful fictions
The new courtier line is familiar: He loves the gays. The Style piece quotes the tribe’s own self-portrait—overwhelmingly white, tailored, not the type to announce pronouns, unbothered by the leader’s trans-panic politics. They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans. It reads like a recruitment poster for assimilation. The subtext: we have traded movement for proximity, principle for portfolio. Spokesman-Review
How does that square with the people most affected? Pew asked LGBTQ adults, early in this second term, what they expect. Seventy-eight percent foresee negative impacts on trans people; 71 percent foresee negative impacts on gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. The public most familiar with the costs does not buy the chandelier story. Pew Research Center
V. Follow the networks, not just the names
If you want to understand this moment, stop treating it as a morality play and start treating it as infrastructure. The roster matters—Bessent at Treasury, Richard Grenell in the cultural firmament, Tony Fabrizio whispering in polling top-lines, Jacob Helberg moved from Valley war room to Foggy Bottom nomination. But the pattern matters more: finance, polling, tech-state, and foreign-policy hard lines braided into a single instrument. A gay man can tune the violin. The score is still written elsewhere. 90.5, WESA, Wikipedia, Business Insider
This is how capture works. The state borrows credibility from the bodies it once exiled, then spends that credibility—to neutralize opposition, to reframe regress as modernity, to make the chandelier the story while the floor plan changes.
VI. Receipts section: juxtapose the script with the ledger
- Quote the optics: “They’re overwhelmingly white… windowpane suits… not the type to be telling anyone their pronouns… They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans.”
Ledger: Executive Order 14168 instructs agencies to police “gender ideology,” with OPM guidance to operationalize it across federal workplaces. Spokesman-Review - Quote the reassurance: “He loves the gays.”
Ledger: HHS threatens PREP dollars unless states erase gender identity content from sex-ed curricula. Axios - Quote the normalcy: “What’s the big deal? We’re just governing.”
Ledger: DoD policy shifts to constrain transgender service; ACA 1557 regulations in 2020 narrowed gender-identity protections in health care—a signal of method and precedent. Reuters, KFF
The method is always the same: soften by spectacle, harden by statute.
VII. The historical mirror
Queer history offers three rules that should not be forgotten.
- Visibility without resistance is vanity. Stonewall and ACT UP did not ask to be seated closer to the throne; they kicked at the legs of the chair until power had to move.
- Policy beats posture. When the federal code recognizes your life, you can build things. When it erases the fields that describe you, your life must be translated before it is served.
- You are either breaking the closet or furnishing it. Today’s chandelier is yesterday’s closet door, refit in crystal.
VIII. The betrayal, named
There is a unique cruelty in watching gay men siphon credibility from a movement born of drag queens, sex workers, and trans women of color who fought cops to make a future possible—then using that borrowed credibility to varnish the rollback of those descendants’ lives. Call it what it is: representation used as an alibi. The A-Gays are not allies; they are alibis. (Poster line one: stamp it.)
And before anyone reaches for the well-actually: yes, this administration has appointed some openly gay officials to major power posts. That is not the question. The question is whether policy secures more lives than photography. When 78 percent of LGBTQ people expect harm, the public has answered. Pew Research Center
IX. Global pattern, American variant
Autocratic projects the world over have learned the trick: tokenize and tighten. Courts, budgets, and bureaucracies do the quiet tightening; tokens do the public talking. America has simply added better lighting and a more active social feed. The chandelier doesn’t fall. It dazzles while the joists get moved.
X. The rupture we owe each other
So here is the demand this piece owes the reader.
To the gay men in the room: if you are going to stand under that chandelier, you cannot simply glitter. You must cut the wire. You must use proximity to sabotage, not sanctify—refuse the talking points, leak the memos that put “biological truth” into the bloodstream of public agencies, and break ranks when HHS turns youth health into an ideological hostage. The job is not to make cruelty look modern. It is to make cruelty untenable. Axios
To institutions: stop confusing category presence for public good. Put bodies in offices if you must, but judge them by what their signatures do to those with the least protection—trans kids, asylum seekers, HIV-positive patients, service members whose records now mark them as suspect. (None of this is speculative; it is either on the books, in the Federal Register, or in the active litigation pipeline.) Federal Register
To the movement: retire the chandelier selfie. Bring back the ledger—the line-by-line receipts, the lawsuit playbooks, the budget markups, the teach-ins. If the state insists on re-casting gender as a culture war, answer with public health data, military readiness briefs, and administrative law. The moral argument remains. The forensic argument wins appropriations hearings.
XI. Coda: drag, back on the guest list
Imagine the next gala with different blocking: the drag performers return, not to entertain but to testify. The string section rests. The first reading is Pew. The second is OPM guidance. The third is HHS’s 60-day letter. The toasts are not to representation, but to rescinding. The chandelier is dimmed; the house lights are up; every donor can see the floor plan.
And if anyone objects that this is not how power is supposed to behave at parties, remind them: liberation is not won from storage. The attic is where we keep what we’ve forgotten. Rip up the floor. Bring down the chandelier. Air the house.
