Lately, Tucker Carlson has been dedicating large chunks of his show to calling Tim Walz “gay.” It’s really tough to convey just how weird and insistent Carlson has been about it, so—apologies in advance—let’s just go to the transcript.
Tim Walz is very obviously gay.… Look at him, I’m, like, well, you’re gay.… I’m just saying, the guy looks super gay to me.… Hey, Tim Walz, you seem super gay, are you gay? Have you ever slept with dudes? … Tim Walz, you seem gay. It’s not an attack, right, but are you gay? … Hey, Tim Walz, you seem gay. I’m not attacking you but I’ve seen the video of you doing jazz hands: Are you gay? Have you ever had sex with a man? … It’s kind of my impression, yeah, are you gay?
When Walz taught high school in the 1980s, “gay” was definitely an offensive slur but somehow also more flexible in meaning—and it was ubiquitous, especially as a playground taunt. I’m sure Walz has heard it a thousand times as an epithet, just maybe not that many times in a row. The most hormonal 13-year-old boys have a much wider palette of insults available to them than professional talker Carlson demonstrated. Frankly, the way he’s leaning so hard on “gay” suggests a prurient interest more than derision.
If I were a junior high school boy from a less enlightened era, I might suggest that Carlson has, well, something of a crush? Since I’m an adult, I think Carlson’s just bewildered and perhaps genuinely curious. This is a phenomenon that’s long been on display: For Carlson and much of the MAGA right, Tim Walz does not compute.
There is nothing more upsetting to a gender essentialist than entirely effortless and unpretentious masculinity. That is why Tim Walz has so thoroughly broken the brains of folks like Carlson, Sean Hannity, and their other hysterical cousins. These are men whose masculinity requires constant upkeep and near-pornographic levels of performance. Hannity styles himself as an MMA fighter; Tucker Carlson famously advocates sunning one’s balls and recently interpreted the entire election through the lens of a “daddy” spanking a wayward daughter.
The recent Faux-ctober surprise that purported to uncover Walz’s history as a “groomer” (an AI confabulation not worth going into detail here) tells on their insecurities both personal and political: It’s a preposterous allegation legible only to those who can’t imagine how someone could do a masculine thing (coach football) and, at the same time, support queer young people (Walz was the faculty sponsor of the Gay-Straight Student Alliance at his high school)—unless, of course, you also have some central deviant desire. Masculinity, in this frame, can only be transactional; you perform masculinity in order to get the benefits of being a man. If you are not interested in those benefits … well, that’s gay.
The reactionary rigidity about the reasons one might want to dress how men traditionally dress, engage in traditionally male hobbies, take a male-coded name, and you know, use masculine pronouns is one reason why they’re so fucking panicked about the existence of trans people. It is also why Walz flummoxes them so. He’s doing all the man stuff! Yet he is transparently and obviously OK with not accruing every single benefit men are usually due. He’s even agreed to have a female boss.
MAGA Republicans were always going to mentally vapor-lock over any man that Kamala Harris selected as her vice presidential candidate. It could have been someone as physically intimidating as The Rock or as assured and as public about their cisgendered heterosexuality as, I don’t know, Michael Douglas? (I’m old school.) Trump supporters would still have whispered about the dude’s supposedly sketchy way of waving his hand (from the always courageous Ted Cruz: “You wave like that in Texas, you get your ass kicked!”) and wondered if any woman who liked him also suffers her own gender malfunction, as noted endocrinologist Scott Adams posited about Walz’s female fans. “Quick VP debate take,” he tweeted: “Women not on the pill will prefer Vance. Women on the pill will prefer Walz.”
Still, I suspect Walz’s thoroughly Midwestern humility about his accomplishments and his lack of pretense about his interests fries their neurons in a particularly sparky way. He played video games with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a Twitch stream and … he wasn’t great! Walz was giddy over demoing for AOC a 1990s-era Sega game, “Crazy Taxi,” but his avatar managed to run over several pedestrians; when they were playing Madden, Walz mainly watched AOC smoothly utilize an in-game Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen just as well the Bills do in real life.
The stunt was mainly an excuse for Walz to hype up young voters and remind them of Project 2025, which Coach Walz has been (successfully, I’d say) framing as the MAGA “playbook.” For Harris-Walz supporters, the highlight was probably the moment they did a live look into Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and Walz spontaneously reacted to the now-infamous comedy stylings of chucklefuck Tony Hinchcliffe: “Who’s this jackwad?” (You can take the high school teacher out of Minnesota, but you can’t take the Minnesota niceness out of the high school teacher.)
Trump supporters pounced on an apparent Walz “football gaffe” made during the stream; a tweet from Walz’s account (let’s keep in mind that the governor himself was actively playing a video game at the moment) gushed that Ocasio-Cortez “could run a mean pick 6.” (That’s not a play you can run, it’s what the defense can do if they intercept the ball.) It fell to JD Vance to try and turn that error into an attack. And, I’ll grant him this: After asserting, somewhat John Kerry–like, that “on the football field, you run like a spread offense or a West Coast offense,” he stiffly suggested, “Maybe I know more about football than Governor Tim Walz does.” This is a genuinely funny line, though I’m not sure Vance intended it to be. I propose that their discomfort with Walz’s gameplay stems more from his willingness to let a girl beat him more than any specific terminological misfire (which, let’s face it, was probably a harried staffer’s slip-up).
The right have been thrown into a panic about the possibility that gender roles don’t necessarily mean much; Walz appears untroubled by how other people act out their identities. In his words, he minds his own damn business. Almost all of their attacks on him have been launched in attempts to dent a masculinity that he wields effortlessly: “Tampon Tim,” questioning his military service, the grotesque mocking of his son’s not-so-manly exuberance, his own delightful, unselfconscious expressiveness. You can watch a supercut of intended mockery and justification for the slurs here and judge for yourself if any of his gestures seem “gay” to you.
You might be surprised to learn that I have my own concerns about Tim Walz’s ability to play to a conventionally manly stereotype. Perhaps it’s a concern I have with the Democrats overall: Are they all ready to run up the score? Are they ready to not only be unsatisfied losers but also gloating winners? Are they willing to ignore the mercy rule? The Republicans are going to declare victory on Tuesday no matter what happens; let’s just say that I don’t want anyone on the Harris team to worry about being the bigger man.
