The parents who listened to Rush Limbaugh — and the gay children they didn’t know they had

To a certain type of gay man who grew up in middle class, suburban America in the 90s and 2000s, Limbaugh became an intimate presence. For many, his words still shape their relationships with their parents today

Obit Rush Limbaugh (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s death was as predictable as you’d expect.

Liberals on Twitter were positively giddy, conservatives were somber — Donald Trump made his first post-presidency media appearance calling into Fox News to eulogize the controversial radio host, and then chased it up with later appearances on OAN and Newsmax. Traditional outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post equivocated, calling Limbaugh a “conservative provocateur” in headlines while fleshing him out more in their obituaries.

Beneath the veneer of left-wing crowing and right-wing commendation, though, is something deeper and more personal.

Limbaugh was many things to many people, but to a certain type of gay man who grew up in middle class, suburban America in the 90s and 2000s, his impact on their life is outsized, direct, and intimate.

To these Americans, he was omnipresent. We heard him on car rides to school, or the grocery store, and on family road trips. He was less an abstract political personality and more like a homophobic uncle or a close family friend.

Anti-gay rhetoric was a recurring theme throughoutThe Rush Limbaugh Show’s three-decade run. In the late 80s and early 90s, as AIDS culled a generation of gay men, Limbaugh would air “AIDS Updates” on his show, where he’d mock the disease and those dying from it while playing songs like “Kiss Him Goodbye,” “Back in the Saddle Again,” and “I’ll Never Love This Way Again”. 

He used the word “f****t” in his early years and defended its use against “politically correct” liberals; he called gay marriage “perverted”, and linked it to the the acceptance of pedophilia.

Though our parents were the audience, gay children were also listening from the back seat of the car and saw their parents nod along to what he was saying about them.

“Shame. You know, fear. Fear of rejection from family, fear of rejection from friends,” was how Mark Hall describes his reaction to listening to Limbaugh as a child. “It made it really hard to come out because you sort of assumed that everybody’s viewpoint was going to be like his.”

Hall is a psychiatric nurse practitioner in New York, but grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, a suburb of Akron, Ohio, where he went to middle school and high school in the 1990s. That was back when Limbaugh was at the peak of his career, with more than 20 million listeners across 650 stations.

Hall told me that when he first came out as gay, a family member’s reaction was, “Please just don’t get AIDS and die.” 

“That’s what people thought,” Hill said, “that I was just going to get sick and die, and I think because of the way that [Limbaugh] talked about it, it made it really hard.”

Limbaugh later said he regretted his AIDS Updates “because it ended up making fun of people who were dying long, painful and excruciating deaths, when they were not the target.” In another interview he said his target wasn’t AIDS victims, but “militant homosexuals” and that the AIDS Update was meant to offend them.

Years after Mark Hall’s experiences in the 1990s, Iyal Basen went through something similar with his dad when he was growing up in Albany.

His father was a prison guard who, as part of his job, would shuttle prisoners on long drives across the state while listening to Limbaugh for hours, and he remembers being confused when his dad began to echo Limbaugh: “My father started saying these things that, you know, just didn’t coincide with his personality and this loving guy that I knew.”

Today, Basen has a good relationship with his parents, who accept him for being gay, but when we were talking, he got emotional remembering a family road trip to Poughkeepsie.

“Limbaugh was going off about how gay marriage shouldn’t be passed in New York, and it was really hard to listen to,” he said. Basen knew he was gay at the time — he was 14 —  but he “wasn’t ready to scream it from the rooftops yet.”

“And then my father agreed and started parroting those same talking points,” Basen continued. “It really made me afraid to come out to him, that he could ever accept me for who I am, because he agreed with this monster who was saying these things about me.”

Not every gay person who listened to Rush Limbaugh as a kid knew they were gay at the time. I certainly didn’t. Neither did Andrew Galdi, a film critic in Los Angeles who grew up in Arizona.

Galdi’s father was a regular listener to Limbaugh and he described to me how when he was seven years old, he and his sister would throw tantrums when Limbaugh’s show would come on (they nicknamed him “Mr Big Mouth”).

He said that as a kid, he didn’t internalize the messages he was hearing until later on: “It wasn’t that I was like, ‘Oh, he’s talking about me and that bed.’ It was more just that I think once I started to realize my feelings, that I was afraid of those feelings.” He said those emotions didn’t happen overnight: “It was like it had been slowly planted there for years and years in the background.”

Galdi’s dad consumed a steady stream of Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media shows throughout his childhood. Once, after listening to Limbaugh, he told Andrew that all gays should be sent to an island so they could be bombed: “That’s a very aggressive and violent thing which stuck in my head. This fear and anger towards a general group of people is how Rush Limbaugh operated.”

Galdi ascribes his father’s feelings to a mix of his Catholicism and a steady stream of voices like Limbaugh, and didn’t come out to him until he was 21. That was three years after he had come out to his mom, and only then it was because his dad asked him. “I was afraid to come out to him before that, because I knew of all of this bigoted hatred that he was a follower of.”

Today the father-son relationship is better, though still strained. Galdi’s dad said he wouldn’t attend his son’s wedding if he got married.

None of the men I spoke to expressed the glee at Limbaugh’s death that many saw online, though they weren’t exactly shedding tears for him either.

Iyal Basen said he wasn’t sad Limbaugh was gone, but that he felt bad for his family. Mark Hall said he was surprised how angry he felt at Limbaugh, all these years later, when he heard the news.

I don’t know that my personal story is as notable as any of the men I spoke to. I’m Andrew Galdi’s age — 32 — though I’m from Texas. And while my dad wasn’t a devoted Limbaugh acolyte, he was one of the regular talk-radio figures on our radio rotation.

Also like Galdi, I didn’t see myself as the type of person Limbaugh was attacking when I heard him. I just felt a ball of anxiety in my stomach whenever he started talking about whoever was the new problem of the week, and thanked God I wasn’t gay.

Little did baby Nathan know that he actually was gay, of course. That might explain the ball of anxiety.

Like the men I spoke to, I don’t celebrate Limbaugh’s death. I don’t take pleasure in the pain or suffering of anybody.

I’m just glad my dad won’t listen to him anymore.