Lindsey Graham: death of a Zionist warmonger
by Pauline Park

Lindsey Graham’s death in July 2026 prompted a flood of unctuous claptrap from both his right-wing confederates and the corporate media as well as expressions of celebration from many progressives and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community which he explicitly disavowed despite rumors that he was a closeted homosexual. One could say that the responses to the South Carolina Republican’s death were as polarized as he himself was polarizing.

Yet it is also important to point out that the policeman Michael Fanone who was seriously injured in the January 6th insurrection provoked by Donald Trump in 2021 was neither partisan nor ideological but pointedly about accountability:

South Carolina’s senior senator did not start out as a fan of the orange fascist; in fact, Graham famously called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot” (Glenn Thrush, Jo Becker & Danny Hakim, “Tap Dancing With Trump: Lindsey Graham’s Quest for Relevance,” New York Times, 14 August 2021): an assessment that has been amply evidenced by Trump’s presidency.

“Raised just this side of poverty and left parentless early, Mr. Graham, 66, has from his school days chosen to ally himself with protective figures he calls “alpha dogs,” men more powerful than himself — disparate, even antagonistic, figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. McCain, the onetime prisoner of war so famously disparaged by Mr. Trump. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Mr. McCain privately remarked that his friend was drawn to the president for the affirmation,” Thrush, Becker and Hakim wrote in 2021; one does not have to imagine that there was a physical attraction between Graham and Trump to consider the possibility of a ‘homoerotic’ relationship in the larger sense of the Greek word ‘eros.’

Unlike Trump, Graham did not come from money and after he lost both parents, he adopted his younger sister in order to raise her like a daughter; but Graham is proof positive that neither coming from humble origins nor showing a personal generosity to family members is any guarantee of generosity of spirit in public policy; in fact, with the sole possible exception of his championing of a besieged Ukraine defending itself against Russian aggression, Graham’s entire career has been one of siding with the oppressor against the oppressed.

Indeed, Graham’s one consistent commitment throughout his time in Congress has been his unconditional support for Apartheid Israel and upon his death, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him a close personal friend as well as one of the best friends Israel had in Congress. As Apartheid Israel launched its response to the Hamas attack, Graham exclaimed, “Do in Gaza what we did in Tokyo and Berlin; level the place!” and the South Carolina Republican repeatedly called for the most extreme measures to be taken by the United States and Israel; he reportedly even coached Netanyahu on how to approach Trump to persuade him to launch an illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer has said publicly that Trump White House staff told her that it was well known in the Trump White House that Graham was a homosexual; the fact that Trump, Republicans and the religious right would support Graham despite knowing of his homosexuality is less puzzling than it might seem on first glance: in some ways, a closet queen willing to advance the Republican right’s homophobic and transphobic agenda is potentially more useful than an ordinary heteronormative politician supporting their anti-LGBTQ agenda.

Note that Graham did support the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) after it was launched by George W. Bush in 2003 and has supported HIV/AIDS funding since then; but this is the only exception to Graham’s support for the right-wing anti-LGBTQ agenda. Graham’s relationship with Trump has been closer than that of any other member of the US Senate and one is reminded of US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror at the height of the Red Scare.

indeed, the Wisconsin Republican’s right-hand man was the notorious Roy Cohn — another notorious closet queen who collaborated with right-wing Republicans in the persecution of LGBTQ people; most significantly, Cohn would later become Donald Trump’s mentor and the aggressive tactics that Trump has used throughout his political career come directly from Cohn.

In thinking of Graham like Cohn as a classic ‘self-hating homosexual,’ another notorious closet queen comes to mind: the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — who kept a young lover (Clyde Tolson) while surveilling and persecuting (other) LGBTQ people and even prancing around in private as ‘Mary’ in a curly black wig; in this context, reports that Graham liked to don red lingerie in bedroom romps with sex workers come to mind.

Hence Graham’s close collaboration with Trump is not in the least inexplicable — it is part of a history in which Graham is situated that goes back at least as far as the Germany of the Weimarer Republik when the openly gay Ernst Röhm (1887-1934) used his Sturmabteiling (SA) to help Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to power — only to be liquidated along with thousands of SA members in the Nacht Der Landen Messer (Night of the Long Knives) in 1934.

In this context, Graham’s sexuality is not only not extraneous to his record in the Senate, I would argue that Graham’s closeted homosexuality is as crucial to understanding him as Clarence Thomas’s blackness is to understanding the Supreme Court justice’s betrayal of the African American community of which he is at least nominally a member.

Following Graham’s death, Them published a report by Quispe López that is worth quoting in full (Quispe López, “In Viral Post, Author Jesse James Rose Opens Up About Anti-LGBTQ+ Senator Lindsey Graham Allegedly Hiring Her for Sex Work,” Them, 13 July 2026); it could well be the epitaph to Graham’s entire political career as well as his life:

The picture of Lindsey Graham that emerges from the report by Quispe López is not a flattering one and one could say that Graham emerges as a tragic figure who was never able to present his authentic self to the world; and yet, in a deeper sense, the hypocritical double-dealing abusive power hungry closet queen may well have been the authentic Lindsey Graham.

It is a well known fact that however bright it may appear in the sky, the moon only reflects the light of the sun and generates none of its own; Lindsey Graham was like the moon in that sense: he appeared to be enormously powerful yet exercised power only by doing the bidding of others — whether Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the religious right, the military/industrial complex or Apartheid Israel and the Zionist machine. Lindsey Graham had no ability to generate positive light of his own and that is his tragedy — all the more so insofar as he reveled in emitting the negative energy of the aforementioned power centers in American and global politics. Graham’s colleague in the Senate, the African American Republican US Senator from South Carolina Tim Scott declared upon Graham’s death that he was irreplaceable; but the truth is that Graham is eminently replaceable: anyone willing to do the bidding of Trump, the military/industrial complex, the Zionist machine and the banks, corporations and wealthy donors who funded Graham’s campaigns will easily slip into his role and his seat; power hungry politicians like Graham are a dime a dozen — even if few closet queens like Graham reach the pinnacle of power; how ironically apropos that New Jersey’s Democratic US Senator Cory Booker paid unctuous homage to Graham upon news of his death!

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. In March 2011, Park co-founded New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and in January 2012, she participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, a seven-day tour of the West Bank and Israel that included meetings with LGBT- and non-LGBT Palestinians and Israelis. Park did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.