Jared Cerullo voted for Donald Trump. He’s a happily married white man living in Kansas. He’s active in Republican politics in Wichita. So far, this is a spectacularly unsurprising biography. The one fact that would make it less surprising is that Cerullo’s spouse is a man.
“I knew pretty early. I’ve always known that I was different, especially in high school. … I just always knew I liked boys,” Cerullo says.
Well before Clarence Thomas joined the Reagan administration; before Benedict Arnold switched to King George’s side; even before Romeo forsook the Montagues, solitary human beings found reasons to separate themselves from their tribal identity. It’s rarely an easy thing. Biology drives us to be social animals. If we weren’t already born into a tribe, our desire to belong moves us to find one. Biology’s compulsion to stay loyal to our tribe keeps most people from straying too far from group norms. Biologists like E.O. Wilson have spent their careers documenting and studying this phenomenon. Nonetheless, individuals sometimes find a cause or idea that compels them to stray from their tribe despite the pain that can come from the inevitable separation. For Max Walker, Wichita native, the tribal identity was not sexual orientation, but racial identity instead.
“My dad said something along the lines that it was sad that I would turn on my own people like that. One time he said I hated him because he was black. But that’s not even on the list of things!” Walker exclaims.
Walker’s racial identity is a complex question. Born to a black father and a white mother, he is somewhere in-between. People often mistake him for Hispanic. Occasionally someone will speak to him in Spanish. Others think he’s black. Without a doubt, to the people who meet him, he is a person of color. He stands over 6 feet tall, with a thick frame, light-to-medium brown skin and afro-textured hair. According to Walker, no one mistakes him for a white person. His political identity is more fully formed. Broadly speaking, Walker is a man of the Right. He uses phrases like “classical liberal” and “libertarian” to identify his politics.
“The reason we have Trump is because there was such a hard push of calling anyone who disagrees with you racist, sexist, homophobic. Hillary’s comment of ‘basket of deplorables,’ when she said that, the crowd cheered. They believed these people were hateful, awful people based on the stack of intersectionality that’s become intertwined with progressivism. I don’t have a problem with someone who says there are injustices in these parts that they want to fix. My problem is when they say that, and then I start speaking and they say, ‘You can’t talk about this because you are a man,’” Walker says.
The reaction of other black people to Walker’s politics sometimes mirrors his own father’s feelings. According to the 27 year old, he faces incredulity that he’s not a Democrat.
“They are more likely to take it personally. It goes with the ‘tribalness’ of the African-American community. They sort of see it as me turning on them, I guess? One of the things about being biracial is that I’ve never seen myself as either white or black. I never saw myself as part of the black team or the white team,” Walker says.
For Kansas City resident Chris Showalter, “Team Marine Corps” presents similar challenges. His progressive political beliefs don’t jive with those of the typical Marine infantryman. The 39 year old’s four year enlistment took him to three continents aboard Navy ships, a stint in Djibouti, where he conducted security operations at a CIA drone base, and two deployments to Iraq. His combat experience in Iraq resulted in a Purple Heart from shrapnel in his leg.
“When you meet people that are really into the college they went to, that’s how the Marine Corps is for me. … I’m always a Marine. … It was the best I ever was at doing something, being a Marine. It’s the most natural fit for my personality,” Showalter says.
Raised by liberal parents, Showalter began to form his political beliefs in his early teenage years. Though they were influential, his mother and father never forced their politics on him. Those core beliefs were shaped in large part by a very anti-establishment community of musicians and their enthusiastic fan base.
“I was a punk rock kid. You’ll definitely skew liberal if all you do is listen to punk rock and are skateboarding,” Showalter says, laughing.
When he joined the Marine Corps, that liberal punk dove into a political culture deeply suspicious of liberalism and the Democrat party. A poll conducted by the Military Times before the 2016 election showed that 60 percent of Marines planned to vote for Donald Trump. 22 percent of Marines didn’t plan to vote at all. Only 18 percent expected to vote for Hillary Clinton.
“It’s blindly conservative, extremely homophobic and yet homoerotic at the same time. Racism was all over in the Marine Corps. Deeply ingrained racism from people all over the country. … A lot of Marines are intelligent, and you get some guys who have actual conversations with you and knew why they were conservative politically. But the vast majority had no idea why they were conservative. Liberals are pussies and they weren’t a pussy,” Showalter explains.
In his “Letters to a Young Contrarian” the late, and famously contrarian, Christopher Hitchens says, “In life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation. … There must be confrontation and opposition, in order that sparks be kindled.” He might have been talking about Chris Showalter. The man is not afraid to tell you what he thinks.
“I was very vocal,” Showalter says.
Showalter’s politics stick out less in his new career as a police officer. Many of his fellow officers dislike President Trump’s policies as much as he does. But even among progressives Showalter is a contrarian. Though he agrees with their policy stances on almost every issue, he finds an important exception in his opposition to gun control.
“Generally, these people think I am one of the good ones. I was a Marine, I’ve been taught to use a weapon. Now I’m a cop. ‘We want YOU to have guns, but nobody else should have them,’” Showalter says, paraphrasing his progressive friends.
Like Showalter, Cerullo would also find himself immersed in a politically conservative environment. Cerullo’s parents usually voted Republican and identified as conservatives. Though politics wasn’t a normal topic of conversation at the dinner table, Republicans dominated the politics of Kansas, likely influencing his political development. However, in his eyes, a charismatic politician in Washington and international politics exerted a stronger pull than either family or his own budding sexual orientation.
“I grew up in the era of Ronald Reagan. We have tense politics today but it is in a different category than what was happening in the 1980s when we were talking about the Cold War. And Ronald Reagan helped put an end to that. I always had an interest in current affairs. Ronald Reagan became an instant leader of mine who I paid attention to. I felt the same about fiscal conservatism. Our household has to operate under a budget and our governments should have to do the same thing,” Cerullo explains.
Like Walker and Showalter, Cerullo’s political identity has become a separate consideration from other parts of his identity as a human being. The pull of political preference trumps sexual preference, race and vocation for these men.
“I didn’t think that my identity as a gay person had anything to do with what I felt about current affairs or how the government should be spending our money. I didn’t think that who I was falling in love with or sleeping with should have anything to do with how city hall was run or how the president should be dealing with North Korea,” Cerullo says.
The inherent antagonism between Cerullo’s competing identities affected those around him in similar ways to that of Walker and Showalter.
“In the workplace I can remember a few times where through developing relationships with co-workers who knew I was gay, at some point there’s a conversation about politics, and I say, ‘It’s hard to believe, but a lot of people don’t know I’m a Republican,’ and they’ll look at me like, ‘What?’ I can think of a few times that co-worker relationships did change a little bit once someone found out I was gay and a Republican.”
Cerullo’s core group of friends revolves around their shared love of bowling. Though he does count a few gay men among his closest friends, he says that they are in the minority. When his gay friends talk to him about politics and his affinity for Republican politicians, it is usually in a humorous way. Intense political conversations are few and far between.
Walker’s friends are also based around a hobby, with race being an unimportant factor when forming friendships.
“It just so happened that my hobbies, like video games, Dungeons and Dragons, even anime; that more people in those spheres were white. So the people I still associate with are almost all white. It just happened to be that we were in the same Xbox Live clan,” Walker says.
Each of these men finds challenges in the interplay of their different identities. For Showalter, his identity as a Marine is more important than his identity as a progressive. Walker sees his political ideology as paramount when compared to his race. Cerullo’s status as a conservative and a bowler is more important to his identity than being gay. But what is the hardest part of their identity?
According to Showalter, the answer is “being a progressive who doesn’t believe in gun control. I find it irritating to agree with people on so many points where their logic is engaged when forming those positions, only to see them throw away that logic they used on other points. …”
For Walker: “Definitely being a conservative. It’s way more that you have to defend it. I can’t help being biracial. No one ever attacks me for that. But like, when I say I’m conservative, they say, ‘So you believe this?! Defend this!’ Or, ‘You are conservative so you must agree with everything Trump said, so defend his comments about grabbing women!’ No, I definitely don’t want to do that. So it’s definitely harder being a conservative than anything.”
“Harder to be a Republican. Twenty years ago I don’t think I would have said that,” Cerullo says about being gay and Republican in the workplace.
The source of contrarians’ motivations can be a difficult puzzle to untangle. But Christopher Hitchens takes his best stab at it in “Letters to a Young Contrarian”:
…of those who are drawn into oppositional activity or mentality it can often be observed that they are rebellious or independent types. Yet the best of them are actuated by concern for others, and for causes and movements larger than themselves.