California’s delegation to the 118th Congress includes 4 freshmen— Republicans Kevin Kiley and John Duarte and Democrat Sydney Kamlager… and one in-between, former Long Beach mayor Robert Garcia. Garcia was also the former California Youth Coordinator for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and the founder of the Long Beach Young Republicans 5 years later. Garcia, who describes himself as a fiscal conservative, entered politics as a Republican. But in 2007 he switched his party ID from Republican to decline-to-state and then in 2010 finally saw his political future as something that called for a “D” next to his name. So he reregistered as a Democrat. In local government, he was a business-friendly moderate Dem who became famous for defending Long Beach’s pollution-emitting trash incinerator, one of the last two still in California. During unheard-fought primary campaign against progressive Assemblywomen Cristina Garcia, Robert was supported by the Forces Of Evil that Hakeem Jeffries directed against progressives— AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel and over a million dollars in FTX stolen funds courtesy of Sam Bankman Fried.
“People are allowed to grow and change,” and former Republicans shouldn’t be treated as “second-class Democrats,” is how Garcia would defend himself, also pointing to his refusal to take corporate PAC money. “What matters is your record." OK. First of all, let’s look at the lie Garcia was telling about not taking sewer money, since it’s what his campaign was built on. His whole smear strategy against Cristina Garcia was filtered through his slime-ball super-PAC, entirely financed by corporate cash, though he technically had "nothing" to do with it. Even before being elected he was behaving like a typically corrupt scumbag, getting around the rules by using loopholes and by lying his ass off with a straight face. As for his record, Garcia mouthed the right words— and then behaved like a Republican, even calling his beloved trash incinerator “recycling.”
Yesterday, his publicist scored big—a fabulous puff piece in The Atlantic by Nathan Kohrman, Republicans Are Targeting Drag Shows. This Congressman Loves Them. Kohrman sees him “expanding what it looks like to be gay in Congress” and asserted that “there’s something unique and irreverent in how he has approached his first few months on the job… publicly celebrated drag culture” and paying tribute to Beyoncé on the House floor… something new and welcome in American federal politics: an eagerness to embrace the pop culture and institutions made by and for gay people.”
Garcia joined the Progressive Caucus and passed on joining the New Dems. His voting record has been good— tied with 4 other so-so freshmen as the 43rd most progressive in Congress. But when Republicans are throne’s deciding what gets voted on and what doesn’t, the only Democrats who don’t have good voting records are the real rot-gut scum bags like Henry Cuellar (TX), Jim Costa (CA), Sanford Bishop (GA), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Jared Golden (ME), Scott Peters (CA), Don Davis (NC) and Ami Bera (CA), who love voting with the Republicans and against Democrats. So far, Garcia is definitely not one of that crew. We won’t know for sure until the Democrats retake the House and start legislating. Meanwhile all we have to go by the judge how our new congressmembers are doing is… how often they kvell over Beyoncé and how often the go to drag shows. I might be less skeptical of Garcia if he endorsed progressives running to join him in Congress… like drag performer and transgender progressive Maebe A Girl, for example.
Garcia told Kohrman, a gay medical student at USC, “I’ve been to every gay bar in Long Beach tons of time.” Kohrman joined him for a drag show at one and contrasted him with Mayo Pete, noting that “being gay for Garcia entails more conspicuous enthusiasm for queer people who aren’t his husband. In Long Beach, he hosts fundraisers at gay bars and has attended drag shows for years… Garcia considers himself ‘pretty vanilla,’ but vanilla in Long Beach is different from vanilla in Washington. Most politicians talk about drag queens and other gender-nonconforming people with contempt, or like a caring but slightly clueless parent. When Garcia does, it’s from a place of familiarity— even reverence. He called drag ‘an important art form’ in our conversation, and vocally defends the raunch and camp that bring millions of people joy and meaning, even as some Republicans try to legislate it out of existence. ‘I’m not going to, like, dial back things that make me who I am,’ Garcia told me.”
Apparently what Garcia didn’t tell him— or what Kohrman decided to not use— is that he was a Republican. Kohrman used a very sanitized version of his political genesis in his story. And Garcia’s colleagues in Congress all express shock when I tell them he;’s a former Republican. NO ONE knows, not even his closest pals in the House. He’s out in every way but that one!!
In Congress, Garcia has begun to use his new platform to position himself as a foil to Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos. Garcia— who earned praise as mayor for his handling of COVID, which killed his mother and stepfather in 2020— sits on the COVID-19 oversight subcommittee with Greene, who has spread misinformation about COVID vaccines. At one committee meeting last month, she asked the head of the Government Accountability Office how much federal COVID funding had gone toward drag-queen story hours, which Greene had previously described as “an attack on our children.” (The GAO head said he did not know.) “She sits, like, right across from me. It’s hard to listen to, but you just show up prepared,” Garcia told me. “I think most people would tell you that they’d rather leave their kid with a drag queen than with fucking Marjorie Taylor Greene.” (When I emailed Greene’s spokesperson with a request for comment, he wrote back: “I’m not responding to someone with ‘pronouns’ in their signature.”)
Garcia also has made a target of Santos, recently introducing a resolution, largely symbolic in the GOP-controlled House, to expel the New York freshman from Congress, after revelations that he had fabricated much of his résumé. Garcia reserves particular ire for Santos’s apparent lie that some of his former co-workers died in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, in which 49 people, most of them gay Latino men, were killed. Yet Garcia also expressed pained empathy for Santos; both are gay men from South American immigrant families. “Have you seen the videos of him as Kitara?” Garcia asked me, referring to a stage name Santos reportedly used in a drag performance in Brazil. “He looks so happy. My heart breaks a little.” (Santos denies having been a drag queen. “I was young, and I had fun at a festival,” he told reporters. His office did not return a request for comment for this article.)
Garcia, of course, is just getting started in his new job, and to stay in office, he’ll have to deliver for his constituents. That his arrival in Washington still seems remarkable is a reminder of many Americans’ narrow expectations for queer people in public life. But Garcia seems intent on showing how a serious public servant can celebrate queer culture at its most playful, and expand what it looks like to be gay and represent America.