LGBTQ+ Ohioans Have Words for J.D. Vance: “I Can’t Stand the Man”
When T. Duane Gordon got a push notification on his phone alerting him that J.D. Vance had been chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee, he couldn’t believe it. “It had been covered all over the press that he was under consideration, but in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, ‘No matter how dumb Trump is, he’s not that dumb,’” Gordon says over the phone. “Then the announcement came and I said to myself out loud, ‘Oh shit, it’s J.D. Vance.’ Trump ended up proving to us, ‘Yeah, he is that dumb’ and chose him anyway.”
The Ohio senator has certainly gotten off to a rocky start since former President Donald Trump formally tapped Vance to join the Republican ticket on July 15. Polling indicates that Vance is the least liked presidential running mate in at least two decades, following a series of resurfaced comments sniping at “childless cat ladies” and calling for diminished voting rights for people without kids. Little could sum up his extremely poor reception by the American public better than the ubiquity of an internet joke that Vance claimed to have copulated with a couch in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was quickly accepted as fact by many social media despite being easily verified as false.
Among LGBTQ+ people with ties to Middletown, the southwestern Ohio town where Vance was born and raised, no love was left to be lost. Gordon, former CEO of the Middletown Community Foundation, says that he confronted Vance in person when he spoke at the organization’s gala several years ago about several inaccuracies in his book. Among them, Gordon says that Vance painted Main Street, one of Middletown’s most historic and affluent areas, as a “meeting spot for druggies and dealers” and “the place you avoid after dark.” Under questioning, Gordon says that Vance admitted “he had never even set foot on South Main Street in his life, and he relied on rumors he heard from his friends in high school.” Although Vance apologized to him, Gordon notes that those passages were not updated in subsequent editions of the book.
The animosity toward Vance among LGBTQ+ people in southwestern Ohio has a long history. Gordon, for instance, was in charge of renewing Vance’s Veterans Memorial Scholarship during his undergraduate studies at The Ohio State University, where he majored in political science and philosophy. Dustin Schauman, who grew up outside of Middletown before moving to the city as a young adult, is still friends with many of Vance’s former high school classmates. He says they universally describe him as a sycophantic social climber, saying that he was someone who “showed up, who inserted himself into people’s lives, and was self-important to a fault.”
Schauman, who now resides in Chicago, admits that Middletown residents can be a tough crowd, calling the city “matter of fact.” “People just roll their eyes,” he says. “They’re not impressed. They’re the first people to write you out.” He says the local culture is a byproduct of “seeing a lot of bad things in your life and getting used to it,” citing Middletown’s ongoing opioid crisis. But when keeping in mind the city’s general lack of enthusiasm, Schauman says that Vance has hardly been met with a hero’s welcome from the town that has known him all his life: “No one that I know was excited, really. It was a collective, ‘Huh?’”
The general antipathy toward Vance is particularly personal, though, for the local LGBTQ+ community. Since being elected to the Senate in 2022, he has authored legislation that would ban gender-neutral “X” passports and criminalize doctors who provide gender-affirming surgery to minors, which is only offered in rare cases of extreme medical need. But Vance’s recent far-right stances seem to represent a stark pivot from the person he once was: A former Yale Law School classmate, Sofia Nelson, told The New York Times that Vance brought them baked goods during their top surgery recovery. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, did not deny the authenticity of a pair of recently resurfaced photos showing Vance dressed in drag at a law school party.
Sammy Haven, who lives in neighboring Hamilton, assesses Vance with the appropriate regional bluntness: “I can’t stand the man.” Behind that frank assessment, however, is a hard-earned resentment toward Vance selling out many of the communities he once appeared to support. Vance’s memoir is bracingly honest about his mother’s struggles with prescription drug abuse and opioid addiction, and he created a nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal, in 2017 claiming to tackle those issues. But Vance dissolved the organization after joining the vice presidential ticket, following years of criticism that it accomplished virtually nothing. A 2021 investigation from Business Insider alleged that Our Ohio Renewal spent more on paying its executive director, who also happened to be Vance’s chief political advisor, than it did programming. The nonprofit reportedly raised so little that it wasn’t required to report donations to the Internal Revenue Service.
Haven, who has lost friends to opioid addiction and watched people overdose in the street, says Vance is only interested in the “acquisition of power.” Although Haven initially had hope that Vance might be the politician who actually helps vulnerable working-class communities, following years of false promises from Ohio leaders, it soon became clear that Vance “used their despair” to advance his own career ambitions. “We elect these people thinking they’re going to serve us because they’re supposed to be public servants and then they just serve themselves,” Haven says. “We’re left behind again and again. It seems like we keep reaching for a solution and then having the rug yanked out from underneath us.”
Although rumors suggested that the Trump campaign was considering parting ways with Vance over concerns that he is an electoral liability, he appears to be stuck with his first choice, as just over two months separate Americans from the next election. Polling indicates that Trump, who very recently looked as if he might cruise to reelection following a failed assassination attempt, is steadily losing ground to his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. At the time of publication, Harris leads by more than three points in poll averages conducted by FiveThirtyEight and is currently outpacing Trump in the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin likely to decide the election.
The LGBTQ+ people interviewed for this story believe that Trump got what he deserves in Vance, the latter of whom southwest Ohioan James Reynolds colorfully likened to both a “lethargic hound dog” and a sideshow clown. “He’s always just going to do what’s convenient and so he joined the circus,” says Reynolds, who grew up in neighboring Lebanon and briefly lived in Middletown in his 20s. “That’s why he was chosen: They needed someone who didn’t have enough skin in the game so that they couldn’t pivot on the issues that Trump needed.” Reynolds pauses before settling on a common local sentiment about Vance: “He’s just a forgettable person.”
Kaeden Kass, who visited his grandmother in Middletown as a child, shared a similar view of the vice presidential nominee: “He’s a copy-paste Republican. I don’t feel like I ever know who he actually is.” But although others expressed anger and fierce resentment toward what they feel as Vance exploiting marginalized people to climb the political ladder, Kass says that he just feels disappointment. He lives in Cincinnati now, and when he sees the fleet of black cars blocking traffic outside of Vance’s luxury East Walnut Hills home, Kass says he thinks of what a “big grift” this all has been. It’s everyday Ohioans who have been cheated, he adds.
“I really enjoy where I live and I want to be proud to be an Ohioan, but he makes it hard to feel that way,” Kass says. “He represents everything that holds this country back: this fierce resistance to anyone that is perceived as other, anyone who’s not a white, Christian, cisgender man. J.D. Vance is not what Ohio is. I wish people had a more nuanced perception of us.”
