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Why are these gay Republicans proudly backing Trump for president?

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Gay Trump supporters Juan Hernandez and Charles Moran at the 2016 RNC. Photo: ABC News, Screenshot

Only 20 percent of LGBT voters are supporting Donald Trump for president according to recent polls, but even that seems high to many.

Trump supports legislation that would allow for anti-LGBT discrimination, supports overturning same-sex marriage, says he would pick Supreme Court Justices like the antigay Antonin Scalia and is in favor of legislation like HB2, which discriminates against transgender people.

He also has a worrying tendency to surround himself with antigay advisers, causing the Log Cabin Republicans, the most well known GOP LGBTQ political advocacy group, to say they could not endorse him for president.

That doesn’t mean every gay Republican has pulled their support. ABC News recently spoke with two California-based Log Cabin Republicans who are still proudly on his side.

Charles Moran and Juan Hernandez were both at the front of the crowd when Peter Thiel, the most high profile gay Trump supporter, took the stage at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Moran recalls hearing Thiel, who is donating $1.25 million to the Trump campaign, declare himself a proud gay man, Republican and American.

“This is my Republican Party,” Moran says. “This is what I’m here for. This is the candidate I’m here to nominate. The guy who brings somebody like Peter Thiel to the deck and puts him up on stage — that’s my Republican Party.”

He calls Trump “the best candidate that the LGBT community has ever seen come out of the Republican Party.”

Moran, who sits on the board of the California chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans and is the former communications director for the national organizaiton, was surprised and pleased to hear Trump say that he would protect the LGBTQ community from “the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.

Being a minority within a minority does not prove easy, he reports.

“The running joke is that it’s so much easier to be gay in the Republican Party than it is to be a Republican in the LGBT community,” he says.

Hernandez reports suffering more than just strained friendships. While attending a Trump rally in San Jose, he said he was attacked by an anti-Trump protester.

“I saw a fist come in and hit my nose and my nose just instantly started pouring blood,” Hernandez recalls. The punch broke his nose, he says.

“I do know a lot of Trump supporters that are in the closet in the Bay area and we all have the same fear that we don’t know what can happen to us,” he adds.

A gay couple interviewed by a reporter from The Wall Street Journal at a recent Trump rally in Ohio found themselves the victims of online threats after LGBTQ blog Back2Stonewall revealed their identities and Facebook accounts.

Hernandez is too afraid of the retaliation that might come his way to put up a Trump sign in his yard.

“It shouldn’t be like that in that I should feel fear of putting out a Trump sign and the person who I want to support, of the person that I want to be in office,” he says.

He has also received criticism for being Mexican and supporting Trump.

“They need to listen to the whole thing that he believes,” Hernandez says. “He’s not against the Mexican culture or the Mexican community — he’s against illegal immigration.”

He says that no matter what happens in November, he already considers the nomination of Trump to be a sign of progress within his party.

“This has been the most inclusive president[ial candidate] that we’ve had in the Republican Party and it is so exciting that the movement is here.”

Watch them lay out their reasons for supporting Trump in the video below.

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