Gays for Trump founder draws fire for anti-transgender comments in NC House bid

The founder of Gays for Trump is drawing fire for anti-transgender comments he’s made in his bid for a seat in the North Carolina House.

Peter Boykin made headlines in Charlotte last year when he criticized Charlotte Pride for rejecting a float entry in last summer’s Pride Parade from the group Deplorable Pride, which also supported the president.

In a statement, Boykin said he was saddened by and condemned the rejection of anyone “from our movement being condemned from the ‘Gay Community,’ one that preaches so-called diversity.”

Brian Talbert, who started Deplorable Pride and is not affiliated with Boykin’s group, told Fox 46 last year that he and a fellow gay Trump supporter sent in the float application to Charlotte Pride.

“It was going to be fun,” he told the station. “We wanted to be energetic. We wanted to show that we weren’t the racist, bigot, misogynistic … We wanted to show that we are Americans, love our country and our president. We wanted to be there to celebrate gay pride. Everything fell into place except being able to celebrate who I am.”

The Charlotte Pride Board of Directors said it reserved the right to decline participation to groups that don’t reflect its mission and values.

The denial drew fire from conservative websites across the country. “To the left-wing, ‘tolerance’ really means only tolerating people who agree with them on all fronts,” Conservative Country said of the float denial.

Boykin has entered another fray as the lone Republican candidate for the House seat in the strongly Democratic 58th District in the Greensboro area. Current U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, D-Charlotte, once held the seat, and it’s now occupied by Democrat Amos Quick, who ran unopposed.

Boykin told The Daily Beast in an article published Sunday that he believed transgender soldiers are “mentally challenged,” too expensive for the military and “would be our weakest link.”

President Donald Trump’s proposed ban on transgender soldiers was not discriminatory but supportive of the military, Boykin told The Daily Beast.

“It’s a business move, not a transphobic move,” he said. “This is a president that is probably still friends with Caitlyn Jenner.”

Boykin previously told the Triad City Beat newspaper that he supported Trump’s push to ban transgender people from the military because “it was more of an economic thing to make sure the military didn’t pay for the transgender surgeries, which are elective.”

Posted one reader: “After reading this article, it’s clear that Boykin has a lot of screwball ideas about a lot topics. Being a traitor to ‘his own people’ is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Wrote GayRVA.com, an LGBTQ publication in Richmond, Va.: Boykin “is a ‘drop the T’ advocate who founded the sketchiest right-wing organization ever to come out of the gay community. So let’s be real – regardless of our support for his civil rights as a gay man, his being elected to North Carolina’s state House of Representatives would be an extraordinarily bad thing.”

However, given the heavily Democratic district that Boykin is running in, “it’s an open question as to whether he has any real chance of getting elected to state legislature,” the publication said

This story was originally published March 12, 2018 at 10:51 PM with the headline "Gays for Trump founder draws fire for anti-transgender comments in NC House bid."