The News
Reid Rasner, an openly gay Republican running for Wyoming’s sole House seat, is spending the final stretch of the campaign on a project he didn’t expect: suing members of his own party for defamation.
On Friday morning, Rasner will settle one case against an Iowa man who called him a “pedophile” under several of his campaign’s Facebook posts. Rasner is pursuing another case against a former GOP Wyoming state senator who he alleges led a whisper campaign accusing him of sexual misconduct.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” said Rasner, 42, who came out when he was 20. “This just isn’t the Wyoming I knew or thought I knew. The state needs to come to terms with the hate and ignorance that’s fueled death threats and violence against me, all because of my sexuality.”
Rasner, a financial adviser who ran for Senate in 2024, has spent $1.2 million of his own money on his campaigns. He’s run as a loyal Trump Republican each time; in 2025, he got some national attention for publicizing a personal $47 billion bid to buy TikTok, offering a “clean break from China” on the president’s terms.
The attention had downsides. Rasner said that rumors about sexual misconduct started after the TikTok bid and continued into 2026, damaging his reputation and campaign; in May, a poll for Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray’s campaign informed respondents that Rasner had “married his gay husband in New York.”
That poll showed Rasner — who won 24% of the vote in his 2024 challenge to now-Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso — trailing Gray by single digits, but losing support after voters were informed of his sexuality. Rasner said in an interview that he was frustrated by that, but had only decided to sue over posts that spread a pedophilia rumor.
“Everyone told me: Don’t file lawsuits,” he said. “I should have filed them on Day One.”
In an affidavit, the Iowa man whom Rasner is settling with said that he had shared the pedophilia accusation based on “multiple social media posts and news articles accusing Reid Rasner of serious sexual misconduct,” without specifying what they were. As the rumor spread, Rasner put out a short video endorsing “the ultimate punishment” for “anyone convicted of pedophilia.”
Ross Hemminger, the president of the LGBTQ group Log Cabin Republicans, praised Rasner for suing. The suggestion that an openly gay candidate was a pedophile, Hemminger said, struck him as the sort of discriminatory rhetoric he thought both parties had moved past.
“I am surprised, because Reid is a very, very conservative person,” he said. “Policy-wise, he probably outflanks most people who hold office in Wyoming.”
Rasner told Semafor that he had also been kept out of some candidate forums since the rumors started, including one organized by the Wyoming Family Alliance, which is officially opposed to same-sex marriage.
A representative for the WFA said that his exclusion occurred for another reason; forum organizers were worried that the candidate was overly litigious.
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David’s view
Tolerance of LGBTQ Americans and support for same-sex marriage have declined over the last few years, most sharply among Republicans.
According to PRRI’s American Values survey, support for same-sex marriage in Wyoming — which did not enshrine it as a legal right until the 2014 Supreme Court decision that overturned state-level bans — is 58%, lower than the national average, and lower among Republicans.
Most people who look at the dip, like Hemminger, credit it to the rise of transgender rights advocacy and the conservative backlash to it. Rasner’s position on trans rights is to the right of Trump’s; he calls gender medicine for children “child abuse” and says that parents who allow it should “lose their parental rights.”
And he got some viral attention for a gag video where he pretended to kick a man (his political rival Gray) out of a women’s bathroom.The decline of pro-gay sentiment among Republicans hasn’t manifested in many attacks on individual people. Yes, the party marks less celebration of Pride; Trump hasn’t commemorated it since 2019, when he was running for reelection the first time. He also took gay icon Harvey Milk’s name off a Navy supply ship.
But the administration has kept most commemorations of lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans while removing commemoration of trans rights, as seen in its reboot of the Stonewall monument.
Direct antigay sentiment has generally lived online, not in Trump’s White House. The worry among gay conservatives like Rasner is that it’s gaining more traction.
Notable
- Last month, I wrote about the recent trend of red states recognizing pro-“nuclear family” alternatives to Pride Month.
- In a Florida House seat, gerrymandered to be safe for Democrats, one of the longshot Republicans is arguing that nobody can be “born gay.”