Joe Rogan accuses gays of stealing the word “pride”

Conservative podcaster Joe Rogan is accusing LGBTQ+ people of turning the concept of pride gay.

“What’s weird is that when you say pride, people immediately think of gay,” Rogan said on his podcast on Tuesday. They were talking about Pride Month.

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“Pride means gay, yeah,” his guest, comedian Tom Segura, responded.

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“How wild is that? That they did that?” Rogan asked, and he brought up wrestler Cain Velasquez’s chest tattoo of the phrase “Brown Pride.” Velasquez is straight.

“Now people are like, what are you trying to say?” Rogan said, and Segura responded, “He’s gay.”

“What are you trying to say?” Rogan continued. “You know, it used to be, you were proud. Now it’s gay.”

“It definitely means queer,” Segura replied.

“Imagine you don’t even have to say gay pride anymore. You say Pride Month. How insidious, they snuck it in. They slowly took over pride, like they took over the rainbow,” Rogan said. “Isn’t that crazy, though, that the rainbow has become, I mean, it’s gay — rainbow’s a gay thing.”

“I mean, that’s what it is now. Pride, it’s a gay thing. The word is like, if you say you have straight pride, people are like, ‘Really? Do you really? Do you really?’” Rogan said. “First of all, why? If you’re 99 percent of the people, the f**k you proud of?”

Rogan’s rant echoes how, for decades, some straight people have complained that LGBTQ+ people stole the word “gay,” which isn’t true. The term started being used to refer to gay people in the early to mid-20th century and once that fact became popularly known to straight people, homophobic straight people stopped using it to mean “carefree” or “colorful,” avoiding the term. They started using it as an insult in the late 70s after it became popularly known as a term used by gay people to describe themselves in the decade following Stonewall.

There are plenty of other words that are used to identify groups of people that retain their non-identity definitions. “White,” for example, can be used to refer to objects of that color, and people don’t confuse them for being related to white people. But when “gay” became known as a term for gay people, many straight people stopped using it for anything else because they saw being gay as deeply shameful.

Rogan appears to be trying to do the same thing with “Pride” by saying that he will associate any use of the term with LGBTQ+ people.

Rogan has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ statements. Last year he claimed that teachers were telling straight kids that they will “burn in hell” if they don’t turn gay. He also lied and said that schools have litter boxes now for students who identify as animals to use instead of bathrooms, a transphobic urban legend spread in order to associate transgender people with uncleanliness.

Rogan also backed Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law, calling it “reasonable.” The law bans discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, which critics say effectively bans teachers and students from talking about LGBTQ+ people since it will not be enforced against straight and cisgender people talking about their relationships and identities.

In 2020, he mocked Caitlyn Jenner for being transgender.

“We’re in la la land,” Rogan said in a 2020 show where he talked about Jenner getting bottom surgery, five years after Jenner publicly announced that she’s a woman.

Rogan mocked Jenner’s genitalia, wondering why she would get gender-affirming surgery if “she was completely woman, all woman, before that.”

Rogan had anti-transgender activist Abigail Shrier on his show and they repeatedly called being transgender a “social contagion,” while Rogan compared trans identity to “suicide pacts” and a “crazy radical cult.”

Shrier said that being transgender is like “cutting, demonic possession, witchcraft, anorexia, bulimia” without any pushback from Rogan, who called her views “fascinating.”