George Santos tells closeted gays at the RNC to come out: “You can be gay & conservative”

Disgraced former New York Congressman George Santos is telling gay conservatives at the Republican National Convention (RNC) that they should feel free to come out after he took seriously a satirical post calling the GOP event in Milwaukee “Grindr’s Super Bowl.”

Santos posted on X to share the “news.” “So Grindr executives are calling the RNC convention ‘Grindr’s Super Bowl,'” he said in a video posted to the app.

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Santos, who was expelled from Congress for allegedly stealing money from campaign donors and his fellow Republican lawmakers, encouraged his fellow gay conservatives to come out of the closet.

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“I’m openly gay, no qualms about it, proud conservative Republican,” he said. “Let me tell you something: Just come out of the closet boys! Come on, it’s fun! You can be gay and conservative.”

“But look, but look Grindr is always outing you anyways based on the hits. And guess who’s in town? It’s all you conservatives. Bye!”

👏🏼Come👏🏼out👏🏼the👏🏼closest👏🏼boys👏🏼! pic.twitter.com/3peFp8KOHh

— George Santos (@MrSantosNY) July 17, 2024

Santos was likely referring to a viral post from the satirical account “The Halfway Post” that claimed as a joke that “an executive” at Grindr told them that the Republican National Convention is “basically Grindr’s Super Bowl.”

Santos also mentions his connection to the app through his husband. “I met my husband on Grindr and we’ve been together six years going on seven, married for almost three.” Santos infamously announced his marriage to Matt in an X post about Senator Dianne Feinstein’s passing.

“My husband Matt and I are heart broken by the news of the passing of Senator Feinstein,” he said in the post from September 2023, which was the first time Santos discussed his husband.

He later posted, “For those wondering and going nuts, this is Matt my husband since Nov 2021… I’m not sure where all the “hard launch” comments came from. Or maybe it’s just that people are starting to understand they got played by the media with all the nonsense they wrote about me?”

Santos was the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress. A New York Times investigation found that he lied about pretty much all aspects of his life. Despite claiming that he graduated from Baruch College and New York University, neither school had any records showing his attendance. The same was true for the firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which he said he worked for but also had no records of him ever being employed there either.

Grindr has not commented on the disgraced congressperson’s statement. But the website Downdectector showed that Grindr has had a significant increase in outages, with a particularly large cluster of outages in the Milwaukee area.

In 2016, Grindr told Broadly that usage increased in Cleveland around the Quicken Loans Arena during the week that the Republican National Convention was held. They also noted a notable increase in white users, saying, “When comparing Quicken Loans visitors to the Grindr community at large, the biggest trend is over-representation of white males. White men comprise only 40 percent of the Grindr community but represent 75 percent of the visitors [at the RNC].”

In 2017, the Human Rights Campaign purchased a geo-specific ad for men using Grindr while attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

The ad read, “You can’t be with us in the hotel room and against us in the CPAC ballroom,” encouraging attendees who used the app to think about the conservative movement’s long history of LGBTQ+ oppression.

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